The final instalment of a series on the EU by Vitali Vitaliev.

“The European Council of heads of governments meets privately two or three times a year and delegates most decisions to Councils of the European Ministers of the various departments. These also conduct their affairs in secret, in effect decide policies, and pass these decisions to the European Commission. Under them are over twenty thousand bureaucrats (with tax- free salaries) who manufacture regulations.

Several hundred standing committees meet daily. There is virtually no public responsibility all through this apparatus.
The whole structure is repugnant to both democracy and common sense.” – From Robert Conquest’s latest book “Reflections On a Ravaged Century”.

It has become almost banal to talk about the increasingly ridiculous and plain stupid EU directives to cover all areas of life, but it is important to remember the following four points (it looks like I have myself – inadvertently and subconsciously – adopted the bureaucratic style of an EU directive):

1. They are not someone’s sad jokes, but properly documented pieces of the EU “legislation”.
2. They cost us, the EU taxpayers, a lot of money.
3. Despite regular – and rather Soviet-style – attempts by European Commission spin doctors to publicly castigate the media for “inaccurate reporting” about their ludicrous directives, none of them has yet been convincingly disproved.
4. They are not as innocent as they seem, for, no matter how trifling, they actively promote homogenisation of everything: i.e. totalitarianism.

William Hitchcock, a youngish American scholar and my co-panellist at a recent “Perspectives on Europe” discussion at the Edinburgh Book Festival, aptly referred to the EC in its present form as a “distant and unaccountable behemoth of an organisation, a Leviathan beyond the control of the citizens, and a focus of anger and resentment”. The key word in this precise definition is “unaccountable”, for the EC, like every overstaffed and purposeless governing body (such as the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee), is inherently corrupt.

Here’s a thoroughly concealed and hence little-known fact: according to an independent report by Ernst & Young, five per cent of the Commission’s annual budget of over €100bn goes astray each year. Five per cent! That’s €5bn of taxpayers’ money that – literally and with amazing regularity – vanishes without a trace. According to Robert Conquest, one of Europe’s greatest living historians, “There is no proper accounting for the EU’s budget; in 1995 some $10bn had disappeared through fraud or incompetence – plus a fair percentage through ‘error’.”

Since then, things have got much worse. In early 2006, the EU said that only five per cent of its 2005 annual budget could be properly accounted for!

The history of the EU is a catalogue of fraud and corruption scandals, with billions of dollars, and later ECUs and euros, methodically sloshed around in some mythical and unaccounted for “subsidies” never to be seen again and often siphoned off into secret offshore bank accounts.

Some of you might still remember the en masse resignation of the Jacques Santer Commission over corruption charges in March 1999. Among the highlights of Santer’s rule were millions of dollars in “agricultural aid” that disappeared without a trace and a senior female official who appointed her own private dentist from a little French village as the EU’s Minister for Science.

In October 1999, a newly-elected Commission under Romano Prodi came to power on the wave of an anticorruption
campaign only to be engulfed by a new series of frauds – the largest of which was the ongoing Eurostat saga. In fact, this saga started long before Prodi – in 1993, when the European Court of Auditors criticised Eurostat, the EC’s statistical agency, for a lack of accountability.

This was followed by a number of “signals” from whistle-blowers inside the EC, but it took the Commission almost ten years to take action by suspending two senior Eurostat officials and setting up internal inquiries.

The scandal centred on Eurostat employees awarding contracts – often fictitious – to outside companies, over which they sometimes presided. Millions of taxpayers’ euros were squandered, paid out in bribes and/or spent on
luxury travel, lavish dinners, racehorses and so on.

As a Eurostat “internal investigation” was creakingly gaining momentum, the EC was hit by yet another scandal – the so-called “grain scam” of October 2003. It was a multimillion euro insider dealing scheme spanning three countries and involving the EC’s €50bn-a-year Common Agricultural Policy. A corrupt EC official passed confidential information to grain dealers in France and the Netherlands in return for hefty bribes. After the EC’s Agricultural Directorate was raided by the EU’s anti-fraud unit, OLAF, and eight fraudsters were arrested, it transpired that the actual investigation had been hampered by the fact that the main embezzler enjoyed EC-granted immunity from prosecution as “an international civil servant”.

The most striking feature of all those scandals was not the Commission’s inability (or reluctance) to face them, but the way it treated the people who had brought the frauds to public attention: the socalled whistle-blowers. Here one
simply cannot help but draw analogies with the KGB’s treatment of Soviet dissidents, bent on revealing
the truth.

Marta Andreasen, the Commission’s chief accountant, who refused to sign off the “sexed-up” accounts and thus to fleece member states in 2001, was first suspended and then removed from her post after a campaign of threats and public smearing. Dougal Watt, a Scot and a Luxembourg-based EC employee, faced dismissal and said he feared for
his life after exposing corruption, nepotism and, in his own words, “a cover-up of Mafia-style systematic EU fraud” in October 2002. The same year, Paul van Buitenen, who worked in financial control at the Commission, also protested publicly and was given unasked-for “special leave” to work from home. Dr Schmidt- Braun, a senior Eurostat employee and another whistle-blower, was harassed into a nervous breakdown by her superiors and was then sent on “indefinite sick leave” in September 2003. At least the favoured KGB device of locking up dissenters in psychiatric prisons has not been adopted by the EC – yet.

How hypocritical must one be to publicly pledge “zero tolerance of fraud”, while secretly stifling voices of honesty and reason from inside his organisation – of which former EU Commissioner Romano Prodi was accused?
And although I have reservations about some of Margaret Thatcher’s views, I cannot help but fully agree with her calling the EU in its present form “fundamentally unreformable”.

Like her, I am convinced that the future of Britain lies within Europe, yet outside the EU-SSR.

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