THE NEW EUROPE-FARCE
BROOKS, DAVID
THE NEW EUROPE—FARCE Brussels Sprouts a Scandal By David Brooks The press secretaries were inundated. Reporters were beginning to ask questions about corruption at the European Commission, the...
...The anti-corruption crusaders tend to be British Tories or European Greens—people on the European fringes...
...Credibility has been established, they declare...
...There, amidst the retired SS officers, ex-porn stars, far-out ranters, and no-hope hacks who couldn’t get jobs in their home countries, a few Euro-MPs have stood up and demanded a public accounting of the EU budget...
...In January, members of the European Parliament geared up to censure Cresson and President Santer...
...An excess of information can lead to disinformation...
...Van Buitenen made other allegations...
...For the past four years the Court of Auditors had refused to approve the EU’s $93 billion budget because it was such a tangle of “irregularities...
...But in the end, the commissioners all agreed to resign...
...Auditors have long estimated that 5 percent to 10 percent of the budget is lost to waste and fraud—subsidies for imaginary fishing boats, nonexistent cows, nepotistic consultancies, and no-show employees...
...A survey this year in France revealed that three-quarters of the public believe investigative journalism is “unethical...
...As more Nordic countries have joined the EU, they have brought their squeaky-clean political culture to Brussels, upsetting the lax southern ethos the Spanish, French, Italians, and Greeks had established there...
...He earned close to $200,000, and the product of his work was a vague 24-page report...
...And there were reasons to believe that members of the commission were launching a counter-offensive against their parliamentary tormentors...
...One of the commissioners held up a report on the allegations against them...
...I have been lonely,” he told the Independent last week...
...Many of the reporters there are full-bore Eurorgasmics, who would sooner cut off their hand than publicize any bit of information that might harm the great dream of European union...
...As anyone who has worked as a reporter in Brussels can attest, there is no denser concentration of lapdogs on earth than in the media center of the European superstate...
...This is a body with two headquarters, a new billion dollar building in Brussels, and a new $500 million one in Strasbourg...
...He subsequently delivered a carload of 40 box files to the European Court of Auditors...
...It’s always bad to see bad losers,” she smirked after the vote...
...But, inspired by the parliamentary crusaders, he leaked a 38-page dossier to the Green party...
...This even sparked a little Euro-humor...
...We are victims of our own transparency,” he boasted...
...Nobody ever made a fuss about it...
...They are now saying I am a fanatic because I go to church sometimes on a Sunday...
...A Dutch journalist once screamed at me that investigative journalism is an “Anglo-American obsession...
...Or at least pretend to resign...
...The commissioner for humanitarian affairs, the Italian Emma Bonino, also threatened to sue the Financial Times, and the commission as a whole did sue the magazine Index on Censorship over a story it was working on...
...The parliamentary fuss mobilized a middle-aged Dutch accountant named Paul van Buitenen, who had been laboring anonymously in the EU’s financial control unit in Brussels...
...Light is now shining into the dark crevices of the European Commission...
...Then they say I am an extreme right-winger...
...They confirmed the massive waste in the humanitarian programs, kickbacks in the tourism department, and the collapse of internal controls in Cresson’s Leonardo training program...
...But their triumph was unimpressive: 232 MPs voted for censure, while only 293 sided with the commission...
...Cresson and others to explain themselves...
...In one sense, the structure of the EU guarantees this sort of scandal...
...I am a member of the Green party...
...But the pressure kept building, notably from the European Parliament, which threatened another no-confidence vote...
...She sued the Parisian daily Lib?ration for libel for printing the story about her dentist, while at the same time not contesting the truth of the basic charges...
...He lashed out at one reporter for asking “a truly British question...
...And so it is necessary to learn how to conceal information of which one is not altogether sure or which might give rise to the wrong interpretation...
...This, of course, is not the lesson the Eurofederalists are drawing...
...My favorite is a short-term 10 month research contract that went to a Cresson crony...
...Meanwhile, the members of parliament were finding greater cause for anger...
...Cresson also hired her dentist to coordinate the EU’s AIDS research...
...The most enjoyable of his allegations were against Edith Cresson, once prime minister of France under President Fran?ois Mitterrand (“my little soldier,” he called her...
...Meanwhile, it’s not clear what is going to happen to van Buitenen...
...In the wake of the report, cries went up for resignations, notably Santer’s and Cresson’s...
...But initially the commissioners remained defiant...
...But the Socialists in the parliament moved to save their ideological soul sister...
...Cresson, the document announced, “failed to act in response to known, serious and continuing irregularities over several years...
...Nonetheless, the Euro-MPs summoned Mme...
...I am being stigmatized...
...David Brooks, a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, covered European affairs from Brussels for the Wall Street Journal...
...Furthermore, the EU is multinational...
...But in French, “patron” means boss...
...They have announced they will serve until successors are named...
...Faster unification would be the result...
...Trying to censor stories meant for the Index on Censorship earns an automatic bid for the Chutzpah Hall of Fame...
...He drank whiskey and celebrated their impending victory...
...Officials in the tourism bureau were receiving kickbacks, van Buitenen alleged...
...The $600 million Leonardo da Vinci youth training program (European programs tend to have names like that), which Mme...
...But the amazing thing about Jamar’s memo, which leaked out at the end of January, is not what it says, but that it needed to be written at all...
...So Jimmy Jamar, commissioner Edith Cresson’s spokesman, sat down and wrote a confidential memo to his communications colleagues on how to respond to the sudden demand for news...
...After all, Jamar counseled, when it comes to being open, there is no need to be “more Catholic than the pope...
...Last year, the parliament actually threatened to reject the budget...
...She was equally bold with the parliamentarians, declaring that she had done nothing wrong...
...May I transfer you to her dentist...
...He said he would appoint another investigative unit, made up of Wise Men, to have another look at the corruption charges...
...The Wise Men found that the security people had even arranged for drunkdriving charges to be dropped for well-connected bureaucrats...
...So the remarkable thing is that the reporters were asking questions in the first place...
...Santer also promised an “independent” investigation of the fraud charges, but it turned out the independent investigation fell under commission control...
...Then there are the reporters who don’t believe in digging...
...Edith Cresson responded that the charges were part of a far-right anti-Semitic plot, which was ingenious since she is not Jewish (though a few of her aides are...
...I regret nothing...
...Rumors went around that he was a religious zealot...
...Each commissioner feels pressured to bring home as much of the gravy for his home country as possible, knowing that ultimately some other country, presumably Germany, will pick up the tab...
...He pronounced himself “whiter than white” (thus violating all known PC codes...
...And I’m still not certain about what is going to happen to me...
...I am not...
...So one lesson to be drawn from the scandal is that the whole EU enterprise needs fundamental rethinking...
...he chortled, unaware that a German TV crew was recording their conversation...
...When asked about contracts with her cronies, she defiantly rolled out her Cartesian logic: “Are we supposed to work only with people we do not know...
...She will have to make do with the roughly $450,000 in benefits she’ll have coming to her...
...Cresson is busy...
...The whole imbroglio started at an unlikely place, the European Parliament, which has traditionally been the continent’s political refuse pile...
...Cresson, the commissioner for research policy, had reportedly filled various jobs with close friends, including her biographer, her former bodybodyguard, and a professor who was paid for advice at the rate of about $2,700 a day...
...In many cases they will succeed themselves, as their host countries reappoint them...
...Although Cresson is not popular among the French elite, the Paris administration didn’t want to see a compatriot made a sacrificial lamb...
...Cresson managed, was rife with corruption...
...This heroic action by the parliament is Europe’s “coming of age,” they say...
...The day before the vote in parliament, Santer sat sprawled in the lobby of the Strasbourg Hilton with some of his commissioners and Pauline Green, the leader of the Socialist bloc which had sponsored the ouster resolution...
...They want to sack us over these...
...The Wise Men report hit Europe with roughly the power of the Starr report...
...Many of these irregularities were detailed...
...He called in sick for nine of the ten months but still got paid...
...Santer argued that the commission was too open to public scrutiny...
...The commission’s internal security force had become a bizarre paramilitary outfit, purchasing high-powered rifles with night scopes and silencers, and issuing rigged contracts to dubious outside firms...
...Going off on a different tack, Cresson also called the furor “a German inspired bid to damage France...
...Its members and staff commute back and forth between these two restaurant-rich cities, leaving a trail of credit card receipts knee-deep as they go...
...I spend all my time defending myself,” she complained, “We have to fight against these mediocrities...
...But they refused to go...
...F?ted as a hero by some, he is still isolated in Brussels...
...The burgeoning European corruption scandal—which culminated last week with the resignation of all 20 EU commissioners— had grown a new limb...
...It’s all a bit ironic, since the parliament itself is perhaps the world’s most unabashed gravy train...
...Reporters were beginning to ask questions about corruption at the European Commission, the bureaucratic and regulatory nerve center of the European Union in Brussels...
...Their strategy was to up the ante with a “back us or sack us” ploy: The Socialists offered a resolution calling for the ouster of the entire commission, knowing such an earth-shattering option would fail and thus, they hoped, put an end to the whole controversy...
...Heads are rolling and everybody is pretending to be upset...
...When Cresson’s receptionist answers the phone, the Brussels wags joked, she says, “I’m sorry, Mme...
...So to cover the disgrace of the truly guilty, it was suggested that all 20 commissioners should resign en masse, the innocent as well as the corrupt...
...Boris Johnson of the London Daily Telegraph described the scene in the EU press room as the commissioners confirmed their resignations...
...The press reports of the January vote mentioned only in passing the one concession Santer made, but it proved to be a doozy...
...The commission president Jacques Santer publicly denounced him...
...The document said Elles was an executive of a training center that had received about $550,000 in EU grants...
...They declare that the scandal is the best thing that ever happened to the European Union...
...Unfortunately, an assistant left Jamar’s secret memo on the photocopying machine, and copies of it were accidentally stapled to the back of a mass release from the European Court of Justice...
...The commissioners are back at work today...
...Her integration within the college [of commissioners] is perhaps not an unqualified success,” Le Monde once noted delicately...
...It shows that the community can police itself...
...The entire British Labour party contingent voted with Cresson...
...I admit that part of my motivation is that I am a Christian,” he told the Guardian newspaper...
...Some complained about being tarred by the actions of the bad apples, especially since Cresson is not exactly beloved by her colleagues...
...The big remaining question is how the whole scandal will affect the course of European integration...
...He’d been keeping track of EU corruption, and like many internal auditors, he had seen his investigations quashed...
...He did manage to take 17 business trips at EU expense over that period, 13 of them to the French town where Cresson had been mayor...
...Cresson, also, will probably not be reappointed...
...One reporter exulted, “Ici nous allons, ici nous allons, ici nous allons...
...But on Monday, March 15, the Wise Men issued a scathing 140-page report, which declared, “It is becoming difficult to find anyone who has even the slightest sense of responsibility...
...It turned out that the French-speaking author of this charge had misunderstood an English word: Elles was a “patron” of the training center, a mere supporter with no financial interest...
...The Euro-MPs are allowed up to roughly $300,000 a year in travel expenses for which they do not have to provide invoices...
...Others tremble at the thought of being labeled anti-European or “British,” and thus losing access and friendships...
...Santer said he was the victim of an “Anglo-Saxon political crusade...
...The Wise Men buttressed van Buitenen’s charge that under the direction of President Santer and his predecessor Jacques Delors, the security apparatus had become “a state within a state...
...Nonetheless, the Socialists won the vote the next day...
...The commission suspended him, cut his pay in half, cut off his computer privileges, and threatened his pension...
...Finally, though, she did concede, “Maybe I was a little careless...
...The architects didn’t want another century as bloody as the last, so they endeavored to take power out of the hands of the volatile masses and entrust it to an aloof bureaucratic elite...
...Needless to say, van Buitenen’s allegations had a dramatic effect, at least on van Buitenen’s career...
...They charged several commissioners, including Santer, with stonewalling or deceiving investigators...
...A dose of cynicism—and sometimes hypocrisy—is sometimes necessary in diffusing information,” Jamar wrote...
...Among other things, the head of administration for Leonardo was said to have begun writing checks to herself in amounts ranging from $1,300 to $3,000...
...The Eurofanatic reporters watching on TV were jubilant...
...When she was prime minister of France, Cresson— known as “Edith-la-Flamboyante”—became famous for her theory that 25 percent of British males are homosexual...
...Cresson declared, in true Edith Piaf fashion, “Je ne regrette rien...
...The EU is designed to be technocratic and secretive...
...The Humanitarian Aid project had roughly $600 million in undocumented outlays between 1993 and 1995...
...Normally, Wise Men commissions come back with a few pages of pap that make everybody furrow his brow and feel virtuous...
...Green put on a happy face...
...I guess you have to be Belgian...
...Santer minimized the resignations as “a political act,” though he is unlikely to return...
...But that has changed...
...But in the last few years, their numbers have been buttressed by Scandinavian legislators...
...Here we go, here we go, here we go...
...and auditors in that department had received specific instructions from their superiors to limit their queries...
...The commission’s arrogant response only inflamed the European Parliament, which began mobilizing against waste and abuse...
...A document surfaced alleging that Euro-MP James Elles of Oxfordshire—one of Edith Cresson’s most vocal opponents—was himself corrupt...
...The French government remained steadfastly neutral...
...After all, they had known for years that corruption was rife in the European Commission...
Vol. 4 • March 1999 • No. 27
