You can hardly fall lower than Eva Kaili (44). A few weeks ago, the Vice-President of the EU Parliament sat in Qatar’s government palace and loudly proclaimed that she “represented 500 million EU citizens”. She has been in jail since Friday. Yesterday, the Greek woman was definitively expelled from the heavenly spheres of the Strasbourg parliament: she lost her title of vice-president (no problem for the EU parliament, of course, which has 13 other vice-presidents).
According to the Belgian judiciary, Qatar bribed the former TV presenter with bags full of money and bought a lawyer in the powerful EU parliament. Kaili would have received 600,000 euros. She hid almost a third of it under her two-year-old daughter’s bed.
Qatar’s corrupt plan seemed to be working: Eva Kaili promoted the Gulf state behind and in front of the scenes, praised the emirs for their treatment of workers, campaigned against a parliamentary resolution criticizing Qatar and asked her fellow MPs to resolution and say a good word about the home of the 2022 World Cup.
Biggest corruption scandal in EU history
It’s just stupid that the Belgian police has been conducting a large-scale anti-corruption investigation in the EU Parliament since this summer. Kaili was caught by them. In addition to the main catch, the Belgian detectives arrested seven other parliamentarians and assistants. In Brussels, they searched 16 houses on Friday. In a new search yesterday, Monday, they found another million in cash. The assets of Eva Kaili and her family in Greece have been frozen. Qatar, Kaili and the other suspects all want nothing to do with bribery or corruption.
Should the suspicion be confirmed, the Causa Kaili would be the biggest corruption scandal in the history of the EU Parliament, the only institution in the European Union directly elected by EU citizens. The reputation of the entire EU would be seriously tarnished and the alliance would hardly be credible if it acted as a moral authority against supposed rogue states like Hungary or Poland. Europe, the geopolitical dwarf in what is already a dramatic world game, would be on the ground.
Current case “just the tip of the iceberg”
Vitor Teixeira (38) is not surprised at all. “The system in the EU parliament is not working at all. There is a culture of impunity. The fines for violations of parliamentary rules are much too lax,’ says the native Portuguese, who searches the EU institutions for the anti-corruption organization Transparency International. “The current case with Kaili and Qatar is most likely just the tip of the iceberg.” Third countries with bad intentions would have an easy time because of the fragile regulations if they wanted to intervene in the political events in Strasbourg and Brussels.
Teixeira gets really mad on the phone when he talks about the mechanics of the 705 strong bureaucratic monster in Strasbourg. “Three years ago, hundreds of them signed a pledge to support a new anti-corruption oversight mechanism. Nothing has happened since then,” he said.
Anti-corruption man Teixeira explains the susceptibility to corruption of the EU Parliament, which passes laws that apply to all EU citizens and selects candidates for the EU Commission (the Federal Council of the EU, so to speak) : The only people who suspect corrupt activities of an MP that could become active are the president and her 14 vice presidents. During the past five-year term of office, 24 reports of suspicious activity have been sent to them. “Exactly zero people were punished.”
Higher fines and better expense controls
According to Vitor Teixeira, the solution would be simple: the president and her deputies should transfer their powers in the fight against corruption to a technically competent body. “This requires a higher level oversight mechanism and significantly tougher penalties for delinquent MPs.” The maximum sentence corrupt MEPs will receive today: 30 days of expenses. Teixeira says expenses are a thing anyway. Here, too, there is hardly any transparency about who spends what amounts on what. All the money that goes directly from the EU payers into the pockets of the parliamentarians.
For the EU as a whole, the corruption scandal in the Strasbourg parliament amounts to a catastrophe. “People’s trust in the European institutions has been totally destroyed. The EU parliament must now look long and hard in the mirror and draw the necessary conclusions,” says Vitor Teixeira. The Portuguese does not believe that is really the case. After all, there will be parliamentary elections again in 2024. Until then, everything must be forgotten in the spending paradise of Strasbourg.