How the EU always gets away with it

From fraud to nepotism to revolving doors between the public sector and industry, the stench of impunity is pervasive.

By MARI ECCLES
in Brussels

In the swish hotel conference rooms and cafés of the Brussels EU quarter, the indignation was palpable: Why had poor Henrik been singled out?

Henrik Hololei, a gregarious Estonian who had reached the heights of director-general in the EU’s civil service, had been caught accepting freebies from the government of Qatar while his department was negotiating a lucrative aviation deal ― with, ever so coincidentally, Qatar.

It was fine, the European Commission said when the matter came to light in 2023: All his free flights had been signed off by a senior person in the department. Trouble was, the senior person in the department was Hololei.

It caused a bit of stink in Brussels at the time, but chances are that in Europe at large, few people ever heard of it.

And that ― as well as the Commission’s muted response, the remarkable conclusion that no EU rules were broken, the fact that after stepping down Hololei simply made a lateral move to a cushy senior adviser role, and the widespread nothing-to-see-here attitude of the Brussels chatterati ― is the perfect illustration of the creeping sense of impunity infecting the system.

Brussels lifers are used to the periodic splashes of scandals and “-gates,” which just this past month included a ruling on whether text messages should be scrutinized as official documents, and reports of fraudulent promotions of a “friendly circle” at an EU agency.

The EU has a problem, and it’s not clear anyone wants to do anything about it. 

Politically, it’s “closer to how the Vatican and U.N. operate,” said Denis MacShane, a former British Europe minister, who saw up close how the bloc functioned. And both of those “have been wracked by impunity and corruption allegations in recent years.”

But even the Vatican’s white smoke could be considered a transparent piece of communication when compared with the smoke and mirrors that often obscure reality in Brussels.

Downright fraud

To draw up a list of the bloc’s problems with corruption (both large and small, and in the broadest sense of the word) is to detail a horror show of bad practice: the revolving doors between industry and the EU, nepotism in the bloc’s most powerful institutions, harassment at work, downright fraud.

The thing is, the EU has plenty of oversight bodies that are supposed to sort out this kind of stuff ― the ombudsman, the public prosecutor, the parliamentary committees, even an entire court system. But when they call out bad, or even illegal behavior (which they do), it often seems not to make a blind bit of difference.

All this would be bad enough, but it also serves to compound a fall-of-Rome mood that feeds the narrative of nationalist politicians: From Budapest to Paris, the failings of Brussels, and the lack of any comeuppance, give anti-European rhetoric an easy ride.

“The EU institutions’ ethical insouciance and political unaccountability has produced a culture of impunity that not only harms EU citizens’ trust in democratic institutions, but also lends itself to be weaponized by anti-EU politicians both within and outside of the Union,” said Alberto Alemanno, a professor of EU law at HEC Paris, and founder of the Good Lobby NGO. 

While national governments live and die at the ballot box ― meaning that corruption and a lack of accountability often come back to bite them ― the EU’s world is murkier and more opaque. 

Just in the past week or so, the bloc has been rattled (or rather, apparently not rattled in the slightest) by two scandals, each of which could easily have toppled a government if it had happened in domestic politics. 

The first concerned the woman at the very top, the person with the the duty to uphold EU treaties: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The EU’s General Court ruled that the Commission had been wrong to withhold from the public text messages exchanged between von der Leyen and the CEO of the drug giant Pfizer, Albert Bourla, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic — and just before the company bagged the largest EU procurement contract of all time.

The full details of the vaccine contract remain secret, despite protests from MEPs who (successfully) took the Commission to court in a separate transparency case — which the executive is challenging. 

But will we ever see the texts? Almost certainly not.

“I’m not saying the fish stinks from the top in this case, but it’s a culture which is pervasive in that there is an attempt to block transparency,” says Herwig Hofmann, a professor of European public law at the University of Luxembourg, speaking about the EU institutions.

The text message ruling, dubbed “Pfizergate” in EU circles, came around the same time as the bloc’s OLAF anti-fraud watchdog found the European asylum agency had been restructuring whole departments so senior staff could move friends into management positions. Any consequences? You must be kidding. Case closed, with no disciplinary measures taken.

The EU operates within “limits” of administrative, political and judicial accountability, said Hofmann. “There are, of course, specific difficulties when it comes to the EU because of the great complexity and the amount of different bodies and agencies and actors we have nowadays.”

Commission ‘coup’

While Hofmann says he doesn’t believe the culture is set by the top, you could be forgiven for reaching that conclusion.

One of the biggest scandals the Commission has faced in recent times involved the 2018 fast-tracked appointment to the position of secretary general of Martin Selmayr, chief of staff to then-Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker — a man known unaffectionately as the Monster of the Berlaymont (the name of the Commission’s headquarters) for his intimidating, hierarchical approach.

Selmayr was one of Juncker’s closest aides and the architect of his campaign to become president. His appointment to the top job was added to the agenda of a meeting of commissioners at the last minute to prevent them from organizing a revolt. 

At the time, critics ― of which there were many ― described it as a “coup.”

Emily O’Reilly, the then-European ombudsman, found four instances of maladministration, including a staggering sleight of hand where the Commission arranged a selection procedure for a new deputy secretary general merely to make Selmayr eligible for the chief’s position.

Over at the European Parliament, the EU’s only directly elected body (so theoretically the one that might find itself most accountable), President Roberta Metsola has spoken frequently of her pride in being only the third woman to be its boss. She pledged to “make it easier” for the women who come after her.

But so far she seems to have made it easier only for her brother-in-law, whom she appointed chief of staff last year. (The announcement was postponed for a few months because the “Qatargate” cash-for-influence scandal — not to be confused with the “Huaweigate” cash-for-influence scandal or the aforementioned “Pfizergate” text message transparency scandal — hit the Parliament at around the same time. “I am not sure adding the sobriquet ‘-gate’ to any story of bad behavior in the EP or Commission is helpful,” MacShane said.)

To be fair, Metsola has won some support for clamping down on harassment, but some say the sanctions placed on MEPs for bad behavior — docking their (albeit not-to-be-sniffed-at) daily allowances, rather than their salaries — are all a bit half-hearted.

“That doesn’t serve as a deterrent because, as evidenced in the last mandate, when President Metsola sanctioned an MEP for psychologically harassing her assistant, she did it again a couple [of] years later,” said Nick Aiossa, director at Transparency International EU, an NGO.

“And that’s a rare case when actual sanctions are given,” he said. 

Except, even then they weren’t: The EU court actually reversed the decision this year because of the way the case was compiled. The MEP in question, Monica Semedo, always strongly denied any wrongdoing.

Scapegoats

If all this sounds as if quite a lot of people are getting away with quite a lot of bad stuff, well, there might be something in that.

Maybe it’s a consequence of how the EU is structured. First, there’s the sheer complexity of the setup (what even is comitology?). “The EU is particularly unaccountable,” said one Parliament official interviewed for this article. In part, the labyrinthine system is what makes it “very opaque,” they said.

Then there’s the fact that power still resides with national governments. For them, having scapegoats in Brussels is handy. It also just takes too much effort to intervene. There’s a strong impulse therefore to maintain the status quo.

“Domestic ― not EU ― political representatives are those who essentially determine whether, to what extent, and when EU issues penetrate the national political debate without being subject to corresponding public scrutiny or accountability,” Alemanno said.

But while that can be a “reassuring” tool for national governments, it comes with “high costs, including making the EU more vulnerable than it could be.”

And there’s a further complication, which national politics doesn’t suffer from when it comes to investigating impropriety. Some conflate criticism of the institutions, or of the conduct of individuals, with an attack on the concept of the EU itself. 

Ex-Ombudsman O’Reilly, who criticized what she described as a culture of “powerful consiglieri” ― a word for trusted confidants that was originally applied to advisers to Mafia bosses ― at the top of the Commission, also felt compelled to explain that she wasn’t attacking the very concept of the EU when she came after its officials for their conduct.

“I know I seem very critical, but I come at it as someone with immense gratitude toward the EU,” she said. 

“I would not have had the career that I’ve had as an Irish woman without our joining the EU and with[out] the EU dragging my government kicking and screaming into the 20th century in relation to women and labor laws. So I see it as a potentially amazing moral force. 

“So when I see it acting in particular ways … that concerns me. And that’s where I come from, not from a wish to be critical for the sake of it,” she told POLITICO last year.

It has led to a certain paranoia: In the aftermath of POLITICO’s reporting on Hololei’s flights, one reader working in the Brussels bubble said earnestly that some in the Commission thought Russia was behind the story. To eliminate any doubt, it wasn’t. (Nor this one, by the way.)

Something with no teeth

EU oversight bodies are putting pressure on von der Leyen, who pledged that transparency would be a core part of her mandate when she became head of the EU’s executive branch in 2019.  

But she has repeatedly come under fire for backsliding on commitments, like the promise to set up a new ethics body with enforcement powers. O’Reilly wasn’t too optimistic, saying she expected “something with no teeth, something that will possibly sit there passively, wait for complaints to come in.”

Indeed, in the first meeting of the Commission within her second term, which started on Dec. 1, von der Leyen signed off on a rule that will actually make it easier to block access to documents ― another decision being challenged by NGO ClientEarth.

While EU judges have the power to reverse, or impose, huge fines on companies, on countries and even on the EU itself for breaching the bloc’s treaties, it has been far meeker when it comes to individuals.

So, for example, when it comes to the Pfizergate texts scandal, despite the court ruling against the Commission saying that messaging should be treated like any other document, “I don’t expect any effect on her, or her approach,” a diplomat from an EU country said of von der Leyen.

Even when it comes to transparency, the effect of the ruling might simply be that those who request documents receive a “bit more elaborate” explanations as to why they’ve been refused access, the diplomat continued.

And so it continues.

‘Throw the scoundrels out’

For decades, capitals and the Brussels core have been involved in a push-and-pull over where power resides and how much the EU centrally, rather than its national governments, should be democratically accountable. While there are arguments for both, a lack of accountability at the European level doesn’t help make officials feel they are answerable to a restless electorate.

“Even the basic premise of representative democracy, that on election day voters can ‘throw the scoundrels out,’ that is to replace the government, does not work in the EU,” said Alemanno, the EU law professor.

“Citizens are deprived not only of influence at the EU level, but also of any knowledge and understanding of EU politics that would allow for popular scrutiny and effective democratic control.”

Some believe that lack of understanding comes from weak media coverage of EU politics.

“It tends to be opinion columns rather than legwork reporting,” said MacShane, the former Europe minister, who served a prison sentence in the U.K. for filing bogus expense claims. “Most Brussels reporting I see in U.K. or European papers is the traditional singleton foreign correspondent type reporting.”

Despite that, he argues, Brussels isn’t so uniquely bad. “Over the years I have seen far more impunity in national governments, even local governments, than there was in Brussels.”

It’s a low bar, but it is a bar.

MEPs, however, aren’t doing the “necessary work” of holding the Commission to account, he said. “All Eurocrats from commissioners downwards are appointed on a party political basis, so the party groups defend their own.”

Aiossa, from Transparency International, also singled out the Parliament as more problematic than the Commission.

“This culture that has been able to fester over the years … has allowed for a series of scandals, Qatargate, Russiagate, Huawei, without any kind of meaningful reforms to address the next scandal,” he said.

He added that some “basic rules” need to be reformed, including a ban on MEPs having any side activities with organizations that lobby the EU. 

“It’s a simple ask, but very controversial among MEPs, who have very lucrative side jobs with many companies and industries that are trying to influence EU policy making,” Aiossa said.

If a smaller second chamber were to be created in the Parliament consisting of national lawmakers — similar to the Ständerat in Switzerland — it might be “better placed to have oversight of full accountability,” MacShane said.

But before things get better, they may get worse.

Depending on whom you ask, a clampdown on NGO funding by the Commission is either a right-wing attack on the EU’s climate and health agendas, or a legitimate attempt to make their financing more transparent.

There’s no doubt that Brussels NGOs are one of the few groups that try to hold the EU institutions to account, something they might find harder to do now the Commission is blocking cash for lobbying the EU.

“The current persecution of NGOs is only going to aggravate this situation,” the Parliament official said. “And the ones behind it know that very well.”

In the meantime, you might be wondering: Whatever happened to the Estonian official, Hololei?

The French paper Libération reported that OLAF found he’d exchanged confidential details about a major aviation deal with Qatar in return for gifts for himself and his inner circle, including stays in a five-star hotel in Doha.

Last month, the Commission finally launched a probe into his behavior after the European Public Prosecutor’s Office opened a criminal investigation last year. Hololei did not respond to requests for comment on the opening of the probe.

Has that had any impact on the aviation deal that he helped negotiate? Of course not.

This story has been updated to clarify the nature of ClientEarth’s challenge to the Commission.