ROBERT HARDMAN: The Brangelina of Brussels, cases full of Qatari cash and the EU bribery scandal

For much of this week, steady streams of police convoys have been escorting prime ministers and presidents in and out of the unlovely HQ of the European Council for the latest European Union summit (remember those?).

Normally, this quarterly gathering is the big attraction in Brussels. But not this week. Instead, all eyes have been on the police cars heading for another institution half a mile down the road: the European Parliament. 

There is no red carpet treatment for those who end up in one of those cavalcades. Instead, they tend to be in handcuffs. 

For a cluster of socialist MEPs and their officials are now at the centre of the gravest corruption scandal in the history of the European Parliament. The list of arrests grows longer as the details become more lurid.

Suitcases full of cash from mysterious Qatari sources; parliamentary offices being taped off by investigators; grandiose human rights pressure groups linked to brazen money laundering; fresh details of hitherto undeclared ‘fact-finding’ missions to a string of nations chasing tweaks to European law.

Nor is it only in Brussels that the cops have been busy. Offices have been raided in France and arrests made in Italy, too. 

In some cases, the unfolding scandal appears to be a family affair with Eurocrats being cuffed along with, variously, a father, a mother, a daughter and a boyfriend.

And at the centre of it all is a glamorous Greek TV star-turned-socialist vice-president of the European Parliament. Police found ‘bags of cash’ at her house in the Belgian capital. 

Eva Kaili, 44, is currently sitting in a Brussels cell, as is her Italian partner Francesco Georgi, a parliamentary aide to an Italian MEP who has also been arrested. 

Described by some of the Euro media as the ‘Brangelina of Brussels’ (although, given the competition, that is not saying much), the couple have a baby daughter together. 

Georgi is reported to be singing away to his interrogators like Pavarotti, while Kaili’s lawyers insist she is completely innocent. 

However, there is no erasing recent video footage of her passionate eulogy for Qatar at the start of football’s World Cup. 

Describing the nation as ‘a frontrunner in labour rights’, she went on to salute an exemplar of how ‘sports diplomacy can achieve a historical transformation of a country’. 

She has been stripped of all her roles and assets both in Brussels and in Greece, where her portfolio of businesses includes a new property company which was registered only last month. 

Investigators are now combing through a raft of recent European legal proposals to grant special visa and aviation perks to Qatar — deals now very much on hold. 

Qatar, for its part, says it has nothing whatever to do with the growing haul of mystery cash, currently valued at 1.5 million euros. 

Traditionally, the standard response of any EU body at the first whiff of scandal is to bury the story while the Eurocrats rally round. Readers of this paper will be familiar with the sorry tale of EU whistleblowers cast into outer darkness for having the temerity to whistle. But not this time. 

This thing is already spiralling way beyond the control of the most ruthless spin doctors. 

Now, many EU leaders have made it clear they are not putting up with it any more, while the president of the European Parliament, Malta’s Roberta Metsola, has declared that ‘European democracy is under attack’. 

In short, the scandal has exposed such a proliferation of murky, unscrutinised bodies acting for so many third nations and commercial lobbies that the case for major reform is beyond dispute. 

This week, I joined a media scrum waiting for the Belgian prime minister, Alexander de Croo, as he entered the summit. 

‘I am appalled by what is being uncovered,’ he said, as he paid tribute to the Belgian intelligence operation. 

‘It makes clear there is a need for more scrutiny in the European Parliament. We are all shocked by this and the European population is shocked by this.’ 

I asked him if he felt democracy itself was under attack. ‘Yes, we are,’ he said, without hesitation. 

President Gitanas Nauseda of Lithuania said much the same, describing the current situation to me as ‘a period of blackmail’ and warning that swift and conclusive consensus on the matter was ‘absolutely crucial’. 

On Thursday, Roberta Metsola came to the summit, ostensibly to discuss a range of issues. 

Yet there was only one big topic on the agenda: what everyone is now calling ‘Qatargate’. 

Looking drained after what she has called the ‘longest days’ of her life, Ms Metsola had even been obliged to accompany Belgian police on their raids on MEPs’ homes so they could override claims of diplomatic immunity. 

It must have been strange watching the cops rummaging through the sock drawers and sofa cushions of her own vice-president. 

After a sobering meeting with the EU leaders, she appeared before the Press. 

I asked her if perhaps now, at long last, EU institutions might genuinely clean up their act. ‘At the end of the day, this is about criminal corruption,’ she said, adding that ‘there was a sentiment in the room that institutions share a need to do things properly.’ 

It’s a pity it takes a scandal of this magnitude to focus minds — but then we are talking about the EU here. 

Its propensity to abuse or mislay vast sums of public money was one of the reasons many Britons said they voted to leave. 

On the day before this week’s European Council meeting, Brussels hosted a special ‘EUASEAN’ summit, bringing together the 27 EU member states and the leading nations of SouthEast Asia. 

At the end, the EU pledged ten billion euros in grants and loans to help the ASEAN team combat climate change. 

And who should be the ASEAN leader chosen to handle this deal? A beaming Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Junior, president of the Philippines and son of Imelda (whose squandering of national funds, not least on her shoe collection, resulted in her banishment). 

‘Bongbong’ still faces a longstanding unpaid U.S. court order to pay $353 million for human rights abuses committed by his family during their previous spell in charge of the country. 

Yet he has returned home from Brussels with the promise of billions from Euro -taxpayers, ostensibly earmarked for green schemes. 

Trebles all round in Manila, no doubt. The deal barely warranted a mention in the Brussels media. 

But then, they are all somewhat transfixed by the unfolding scandal of ‘Qatargate’ — although the latest findings have also raised suggestions of unregistered lobbying on behalf of Morocco, too. 

On the one hand, I suppose people should be encouraged by Roberta Metsola’s pledge that there will be ‘no impunity, no sweeping under the carpet and no business as usual’. 

She has promised new rules on everything from a register of interests to an audit of pressure groups. 

Two of those at the heart of the latest scandal rejoice in the hilariously right-on names of ‘No Peace Without Justice’ and ‘Fight Impunity’. 

The trouble is, this investigation owes nothing at all to parliamentary scrutiny. We have the Belgian intelligence services to thank for diligent hard work. 

This week, the Politico website published an excellent piece on the woefully lax selfpolicing of MEPs. 

It found that during the last parliamentary term, 24 MEPs were deemed to be in breach of the European Parliament’s code of conduct. 

The penalty for such misconduct is hardly punitive — a loss of pay for up to 30 days. Yet not a single MEP was punished. 

One German MEP had even been caught approaching company CEOs, offering himself for hire as a consultant on new financial rules which he himself had just written. 

‘No violation’, decreed the (then) parliamentary president. This week — unsurprisingly — MEPs supported a motion on tougher rules. However, the vote was non-binding. 

And just look what this shower did a mere two months ago. In October, MEPs actually voted for a new system removing any need for any receipts for their £4,200 monthly expenses allowance. 

The system was weak enough before, with only cursory checks on what MEPs were doing with the money. 

Now they can simply pocket the lot without a word. ‘If you want accountability, your place is not in Brussels,’ says Cristian Terhes, a Romanian MEP, Catholic priest and long-term anticorruption campaigner. He is not surprised by the latest scandal and does not believe it will be the last. 

‘I hope for the best but, looking at what has happened in the past, I expect there will be a lot of movement and noise and then slowly it will all fade away. 

There are MEPs here with lots of other jobs and they traffic their power in parliament.’ 

He says the mindset is endemic across the EU and points to his quest to unearth the details of 71billion of vaccine contracts agreed by the European Commission. When the papers were finally, grudgingly, revealed, vast chunks had been redacted. 

Earlier this year, an official EU watchdog formally reprimanded the EC’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, for failing to produce her phone text exchanges with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. 

Mr Teres wants to see all MEPs forced to fill in a register of interests like the one that now applies in his home nation. ‘I have to account for every bank account, every share in a company, every car and so on. 

That is correct but it should be applied to all,’ he says. Certainly, the Qatargate scandal is playing well in those Eastern European nations usually at loggerheads with the EU leadership. 

Hungary’s Viktor Orban was gleefully channelling his inner Donald Trump this week, declaring: ‘It is high time that the swamp was drained here in Brussels.’ T his sort of language dismays the centrist, federalist status quo brigade who still control the EU. 

Problematic Britain may have departed the stage but there are European elections in the offing in 2024 and scandals like this one are fertile territory for Eurosceptic candidates right across the EU. 

Ultimately, Brussels has only itself to blame. Readers may recall the appalling case of Robert McCoy, championed by this paper. 

He was the auditor of another EUinstitution, the Committee of the Regions. Way back in 2000, he began noticing blatant fraud. A well-known Belgian politician had charged nearly a week of expenses for attending a conference in the Loire Valley that had lasted one day. 

An Italian councillor had been routinely charging for flights he had never taken. Printing c­ontracts had been offered to chums on the basis of fake rival tenders. And so on. 

Yet when McCoy took his findings to the authorities, who upheld them all, McCoy was ostracised and vilified at work. None of the culprits was demoted, let alone fired. Eventually, in 2004, McCoy had a nervous breakdown and, three years later, was invalided out on a modest pension. 

Yet he never gave up fighting for an apology and his legal costs. Astonishingly, he had to battle on until last year before he finally received justice. I spoke to him this week. 

He was anything but bitter, expressing a hope that things have much improved since his ordeal. Yet he remains a realist. 

‘Nothing surprises me any more,’ he says. ‘Whenever money is involved , people will always get their snouts in the trough. ‘I am always worried that they then revert to the knee-jerk reaction of every bureaucracy, which is to organise an internal inquiry and a cover-up.’ 

His solution to rooting out endemic EU corruption? ‘Just follow the details. You’ve always got to fight them on the details.’ It looks as though the Belgian police are doing just that — starting underneath Brangelina’s bed.