The EU’s reply to Qatargate: Nips, tucks and
paperwork
Calls for a more profound overhaul have been met with
finger-pointing, blame-shifting and bureaucratic slow-walking.
“Judge us on what we’ve done rather [than] on what we
didn’t,” Roberta Metsola told journalists earlier this month |
BY EDDY WAX
AND SARAH WHEATON
JULY 31,
2023 4:04 AM CET
STRASBOURG
— The European Parliament’s response to Qatargate: Fight corruption with
paperwork.
When
Belgian police made sweeping arrests and recovered €1.5 million from Parliament
members in a cash-for-influence probe last December, it sparked mass clamoring
for a deep clean of the institution, which has long languished with lax ethics
and transparency rules, and even weaker enforcement.
Seven
months later, the Parliament and its president, Roberta Metsola, can certainly
claim to have tightened some rules — but the results are not much to shout
about. With accused MEPs Eva Kaili and Marc Tarabella back in the Parliament
and even voting on ethics changes themselves, the reforms lack the political
punch to take the sting out of a scandal that Euroskeptic forces have leaped on
ahead of the EU election next year.
“Judge us
on what we’ve done rather [than] on what we didn’t,” Metsola told journalists
earlier this month, arguing that Parliament has acted swiftly where it could.
While the
Parliament can claim some limited improvements, calls for a more profound
overhaul in the EU’s only directly elected institution — including more serious
enforcement of existing rules — have been met with finger-pointing,
blame-shifting and bureaucratic slow-walking.
The
Parliament dodged some headline-worthy proposals in the process. It declined to
launch its own inquiry into what really happened, it decided not to force MEPs
to declare their assets and it won’t be stripping any convicted MEPs of their
gold-plated pensions.
Instead,
the institution favored more minimal nips and tucks. The rule changes amount to
much more bureaucracy and more potential alarm bells to spot malfeasance sooner
— but little in the way of stronger enforcement of ethics rules for MEPs.
EU
Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly, who investigates complaints about EU administration
lamented that the initial sense of urgency to adopt strict reforms had “dissipated.”
After handing the EU a reputational blow, she argued, the scandal’s aftermath
offered a pre-election chance, “to show that lessons have been learned and
safeguards have been put in place.”
Former MEP
Richard Corbett, who co-wrote the Socialists & Democrats group’s own
inquiry into Qatargate and favors more aggressive reforms, admitted he isn’t
sure whether Parliament will get there.
“The
Parliament is getting to grips with this gradually, muddling its way through
the complex field, but it’s too early to say whether it will do what it
should,” he said.
Bags of cash
The sense
of resignation that criminals will be criminals was only one of the starting
points that shaped the Parliament’s response.
“We will
never be able to prevent people taking bags of cash. This is human nature. What
we have to do is create a protection network,” said Raphaël Glucksmann, a
French MEP who sketched out some longer-term recommendations he hopes the
Parliament will take up.
Another is
that the Belgian authorities’ painstaking judicial investigation is still
ongoing, with three MEPs charged and a fourth facing imminent questioning. Much
is unknown about how the alleged bribery ring really operated, or what the
countries Qatar, Morocco and Mauritania really got for their bribes.
On top of
that, Parliament was occasionally looking outward rather than inward for people
to blame.
Metsola’s
message in the wake of the scandal was that EU democracy was “under attack” by
foreign forces. The emphasis on “malign actors, linked to autocratic third
countries” set the stage for the Parliament’s response to Qatargate: blame
foreign interference, not an integrity deficit.
Instead of
creating a new panel to investigate how corruption might have steered
Parliament’s work, Parliament repurposed an existing committee on foreign
interference and misinformation to probe the matter. The result was a set of
medium- and long-term recommendations that focus as much on blocking IT
contractors from Russia and China as they do on holding MEPs accountable — and
they remain merely recommendations.
Metsola did
also turn inward, presenting a 14-point plan in January she labeled as “first
steps” of a promised ethics overhaul. The measures are a finely tailored
lattice-work of technical measures that could make it harder for Qatargate to
happen again, primarily by making it harder to lobby the Parliament undetected.
The central
figure in Qatargate, an Italian ex-MEP called Pier Antonio Panzeri, enjoyed
unfettered access to the Parliament, using it to give prominence to his human
rights NGO Fight Impunity, which held events and even struck a collaboration
deal with the institution.
This
14-point package, which Metsola declared is now “done,” includes a new entry
register, a six-month cooling-off period banning ex-MEPs from lobbying their
colleagues, tighter rules for events, stricter scrutiny of human rights work —
all tailored to ensure a future Panzeri hits a tripwire and can be spotted
sooner.
Notably, however,
an initial idea to ban former MEPs from lobbying for two years after leaving
office — which would mirror the European Commission’s rules — instead turned
into just a six-month “cooling off” period.
Internal divisions
Behind the
scenes, the house remains sharply divided over just how much change is needed.
Many MEPs resisted bigger changes to how they conduct their work, despite
Metsola’s promise in December that there would be “no business as usual,” which
she repeated in July.
The limited
ambition reflects an argument — pushed by a powerful subset of MEPs, primarily
in Metsola’s large, center-right European People’s Party group — that changing
that “business as usual” will only tie the hands of innocent politicians while
doing little to stop the few with criminal intent. They’re bolstered by the
fact that the Socialists & Democrats remain the only group touched by the
scandal.
“There were
voices in this house who said, ‘Do nothing, these things will always happen,
things are fine as they are,’” Metsola said. Some of the changes, she said, had
been “resisted for decades” before Qatargate momentum pushed them through.
The
Parliament already has some of the Continent’s highest standards for
legislative bodies, said Rainer Wieland, a long-serving EPP member from Germany
who sits on the several key rule-making committees: “I don’t think anyone can
hold a candle to us.”
MEP Rainer
Wieland holds lots of sway over the reforms | Patrick Seeger/EFE via EPA
Those who
are still complaining, he added in a debate last week, “are living in
wonderland.”
Wieland
holds lots of sway over the reforms. He chairs an internal working group on the
Parliament’s rules that feeds into the Parliament’s powerful Committee on
Constitutional Affairs, where Metsola’s 14-point plan will be translated into
cold, hard rules.
Those rule
changes are expected to be adopted by the full Parliament in September.
The
measures will boost existing transparency rules significantly. The lead MEP on
a legislative file will soon have to declare (and deal with) potential
conflicts of interest, including those coming from their “emotional life.” And
more MEPs will have to publish their meetings related to parliamentary
business, including those with representatives from outside the EU.
Members
will also have to disclose outside income over €5,000 — with additional details
about the sector if they work in something like law or consulting.
Negotiators
also agreed to double potential penalties for breaches: MEPs can lose their
daily allowance and be barred from most parliamentary work for up to 60 days.
Yet the
Parliament’s track record punishing MEPs who break the rules is virtually
nonexistent.
As it
stands, an internal advisory committee can recommend a punishment, but it’s up
to the president to impose it. Of 26 breaches of transparency rules identified
over the years, not one MEP has been punished. (Metsola has imposed penalties
for things like harassment and hate speech.)
And hopes
for an outside integrity cop to help with enforcement were dashed when a
long-delayed Commission proposal for an EU-wide independent ethics body was
scaled back.
Stymied by
legal constraints and left-right divides within the Parliament, the Commission
opted for suggesting a standards-setting panel that, at best, would pressure
institutions into better policing their own rules.
“I really
hate listening to some, especially members of the European Parliament, who say
that ‘Without having the ethics body, we cannot behave ethical[ly],’”
Commission Vice President for Values and Transparency Věra Jourová lamented in
June.
Metsola,
for her part, has pledged to adhere to the advisory committee’s recommendations
going forward. But MEPs from across the political spectrum flagged the
president’s complete discretion to mete out punishments as unsustainable.
“The
problem was not (and never really was) [so] much the details of the rules!!! But
the enforcement,” French Green MEP Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield — who sits in the
working group — wrote to POLITICO.
Wieland,
the German EPP member on the rule-making committees, presented the situation
more matter-of-factly: Parliament had done what it said it would do.
“We fully
delivered” on Metsola’s plan, Wieland told POLITICO in an interview. “Not
more than that.”
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