The rank odour that emits from the EU

[Drooper]

It amazes me how much flack the US political administration gets on this forum compared to that in the EU.

Time to redress the balance. This case just gets worse and worse.

Outrage grows at EU treatment of whistleblower

Euro-MPs expressed outrage yesterday over the treatment of an EU official driven from her job for exposing widespread fraud at the European Commission's Eurostat data office.

So far, no Eurostat official has been punished for the diversion of £3m of taxpayer funds into illegal accounts over three years ago in a scam described as a "vast enterprise of looting" by investigators.

All the accused - mostly French officials - are still working for the EU or have retired with full pensions.

But the EU accountant who helped uncover the Eurostat abuses, Dorte Schmidt-Brown, fled home to Denmark after being subjected to a campaign of threats and harassment.

 

[Darat]

Yep it’s terrible, and there have been other examples (I don’t have links to hand but read Private Eye ) equally appalling.

I think it is a symptom of a deep running problem with the current EU system which is that the bureaucrats are not accountable (enough) to the elected representatives. This I believe is because the separate states that make up the EU ultimately do not want to give up their ability to influence and even dictate policy to the elected representatives.

What we see is the result of a group of people with considerable power that are not directly accountable day-to-day to anyone.



(Edited for words.)

 

[Giz]

This is a bit worrying:
"Jens-Peter Bonde, a Danish MEP, said the only two people have ever been "punished" for the affair: the whistleblower herself and the German journalist who broke the story, Hans-Martin Tillack, who was arrested by Belgian police on the basis of charges now proved to have been trumped up by the Commission itself.

The police seized Mr Tillack's computers, telephones, address books and five years of investigative files, exposing his inside sources. In his recent case, the European Court also ruled in favour of Brussels, even though seizure of a reporter's notes are a breach of European human rights law."

So it's not just the Commission, our great defence against abuses - the European Court - is part and parcel of the facist power grabbing, money grubbing disgrace.

 

[kedo1981]

Why do you think us yanks got the hell out?

 

[Giz]

Why do you think us yanks got the hell out?

Something to do with tea wasn't it?

 

[Charlie Monoxide]

Stop the presses! The US does not have a monopoly on greed and corruption .....

Charlie (defending the greed and corruption in the US) Monoxide

 

[Jon_in_london]

Oh, and when where the EU accounts last signed off?

Rearrange the following:

iceberg tip the eurostat of is the

 

[Darat]

Stop the presses! The US does not have a monopoly on greed and corruption .....

Charlie (defending the greed and corruption in the US) Monoxide

Oh great, now the thread will be inundated with USAians getting angry that someone is suggesting that their corruption isn’t the biggest in the world…

My serious point is that I do think there are fundamental flaws in accountability in the EU that urgently need addressing. I don’t think they are a result of deliberate planning but just like a lot of the current internal EU problems they are the result of the expansion of an organisation that was originally set up to handle an international trading treaty.

 

[zenith-nadir]

It's not the rank odour that emits from the EU...it's the HEADLICE!!!

British lawmakers nit-picking - Jul 5, 2005

LONDON (AFP) - Shared combs and brushes have been banned from Britain's lower House of Commons in a bid to thwart headlice, a newspaper said.

Combs and brushes have been provided in the washrooms for centuries so lawmakers can smarten up before meeting visitors or entering the chamber.

 

[Manny]

Oh great, now the thread will be inundated with USAians getting angry that someone is suggesting that their corruption isn’t the biggest in the world…

We're number one! We're number one! We're number one!

My serious point is that I do think there are fundamental flaws in accountability in the EU that urgently need addressing. I don’t think they are a result of deliberate planning but just like a lot of the current internal EU problems they are the result of the expansion of an organisation that was originally set up to handle an international trading treaty.

I agree with all of this. As to coverage, I think that a) it's really hard to figure out and harder still to explain what's happening -- the EU by nature is a bureaucracy so it's harder to pin blame on a single minister or official, which makes it more difficult to center a story and that b) the EU is only a small part of "Europe" and there doesn't matter as much as "the administration" does to the US. When a US administration does something, one can fairly argue that "The US" is doing it, internal opposition notwithstanding. That's not as true with the EU.