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Crooks Corner
After a month reporting on threats to western freedoms from religious nutters, the media's fawning indulgence of terrorists and Iran's drive for nuclear armageddon, it seems almost a relief to get back to a report on European Parliament MPs with their snouts in the trough once more.
All thanks to the International Herald Tribune, then, for reporting that despite promises to clean up their act, only 37 out of 732 MEPs have agreed to pay back the travel expenses they creamed off from EU funds.
Long-term EURSOC readers will remember that the European Parliament offers MEPs a range of delightful scams with which to supplement their already high salaries. One of the most famous is the daily expenses scam, where parliamentarians can sign for their daily allowance of €274 in the morning, then clear off back home without attending parliament or committees. Austrian MEP Hans-Peter Martin was subjected to a hate campaign by fellow MEPs after filming colleagues signing in and sodding off in 2004. Martin even caught an Irish MEP moaning that the sign-in office was late to open, thus preventing him from signing in (274€), jumping into a cab (allowance €50) and catching a plane home (see below).
Martin himself reckons he pocketed €20,000 in TAX-FREE expenses in 2002.
The other scam, perhaps more lucrative, is the notorious air travel swindle, where MEPs are reimboursed for the price of the most expensive economy air ticket, no matter how they travel. Here's the IHT two years ago on a fiddling Finn:
"Last week, for example, the Travelocity Web site offered a round trip between Helsinki and Brussels on Brussels Airlines for about E200. But under Parliament's compensation rate, (the MEP), judging from the most recent figures obtained by the Herald Tribune and The Times, would have been reimbursed for a fare of roughly E1,700, and also for another E357 for traveling more than 1,500 kilometers."
During the last European elections, over 200 candidates pledged to eliminate this scam. Another 89 German MEPs declared they would take only the actual cost of their travel costs as expenses.
As we noted above, only 37 MEPs out of the entire 732 have bothered to pay back travel expenses they didn't use.
"Only €234,096 was paid back to Parliament out of a total travel budget for Parliament members of more than €60 million," the IHT reports.
The newspaper highlights a series of other perks that MEPs have not been too shy to exploit. €150,000 per MEP is set aside for office costs annually - and nothing prevents the MEP employing his missus as his PA, adding substantially to household income. A prominent Northern Irish MEP was rumoured to keep his wife and two sons in honest employment thanks to this little earner.
They also get chauffeured cars (what do they need taxi allowances for, then?), free language lessons (why? the EU spends €163 million evey year on interpreters) and, best of all, "members of Parliament and their families are each allowed up to 60 sessions a year of a combination of medical massage, medical gymnastics, hydromassage and hydrotherapy."
All that stress over how to spend their loot, poor dears. Who would begrudge them a relaxing massage?
