Thanks to EU Referendum for the pointer to this RTL report featuring Hans Peter Martin quizzing MEPs about their expenses in Parliament.

A fine comedy moment is provided by Green MEP Hiltrud Breyer running into a wall to escape the cameras.

Martin may have 1,500 hours of tape. Via a commenter on John’s blog, this from the trib in 2004:

Ambling through European Parliament corridors with a hidden minicam the size of a big sponge, a slightly disheveled Austrian legislator, Hans-Peter Martin, assembled some of the most revealing information about the perk system.

Caught on tape was last December’s Socialist group meeting. Also captured were German politicians fleeing Brussels and Strasbourg after signing in for their daily stipends, pictures that caused huge embarrassment when they appeared in the press.

But that is only the beginning. Martin, 46, a former Der Spiegel journalist, claims to have 1,500 hours of tape. His videos sometimes veer between midsections and double chins, with unintended ceiling shots thrown in. But they clearly display his ability to pose banal questions that draw frank admissions.

That’s from 2004, so I’m not sure when the RTL footage dates from.

Bruno Waterfield reckons “the genie’s out of the bottle” as regards transparency of MEPs’ expenses.

Scientifically speaking, genies aren’t necessarily precursors to disaster. Perhaps he means Pandora’s box has been opened.

Whatever. Is it true? Only partially. The outing of a few Tory MEPs isn’t exactly a revolution in Brussels. The problem remains that there are 700 more MEPs to think about, many of whom publish minimal information about how their allowances are spent. Indeed, it’s only the fact that MEPs Purvis and Chichester were slightly more open than others that allowed them to be caught out.

Now, it’s likely that Bruno has more information than he’s able to publish at the moment. He’s hinted as much. So my doubts may be invalidated in a welter of scandal over the coming weeks.

But the inadequacy of Parliament’s transparency rules suggests otherwise.

Rule 9 says “Parliament may lay down rules governing the transparency of its Members’ financial interests, which shall be attached to these Rules of Procedure as an annex.”

Turning to the annex, we find Article 2:

“Article 2

The Quaestors shall keep a register in which each Member shall make a personal, detailed declaration of:

(a)    his professional activities and any other remunerated functions or activities,

(b)    any support, whether financial or in terms of staff or material, additional to that provided by Parliament and granted to the Member in connection with his political activities by third parties, whose identity shall be disclosed.”

The loopholes this offers are enthusiastically exploited. There’s no requirement for MEPs to publish the names of service companies, and even if there were it’s a hell of a task to find out whether the same MEPs are actually directors or otherwise closely involved. The exhortation to publish a “detailed” declaration is totally ignored and there’s no requirement for them to explain what they actually spend the money on. Assistants don’t need to be named, so even if we know that MEP Miggins has six paid helpers they could be sitting watching daytime TV for all we know, or seconded to socialist think tanks, or flying around Asia, all on our money.

Of course clowns like Pottering, the President of Parliament, are hoping none of this will change before the 2009 elections. And I’m not sure he’s wrong.

Digging into the financial statements of our MEPs is pleasant sport, as Guido is demonstrating. Ban a people from hunting foxes, and they will find alternative targets.

The trouble is that many MEPs choose to keep their details sketchy at best. We can only guess what some of the declared items referred to, and in many cases we’re left with questions rather than answers.

For example, why has Graham Booth not updated his declaration since 11 October 2006 even though the rules say it must be updated once a year? And what is the name of the company of which he’s a director?

UPDATE:  A concerned Mr Booth calls to tell me it’s a mystery why his declaration hasn’t been updated. He’s signed it but it hasn’t been uploaded. Incidentally his company was a Torbay hotel which he sold last year, not a service provider.

UPDATE: I’ve removed a question about Nirj Deva’s assistants as he’s been in touch and named them all. I can’t see any reason to post their names here, however, since there’s nothing in the rules that says he has to make their names public.

Why is Peter Skinner’s declaration of interests dated 3 July 2008 when we’re still in June?

What’s the name of the service company providing secretarial assistance to David Sumberg?

Why has John Whittaker not updated his declaration for almost two years? The last is one is dated 7 September 2006, even though the rules say the declaration must be updated every year.

Questions, questions.

Image: Dover and Chichester getting a rocket earlier today

Guido is doing some excellent work uncovering the distinctly odd channeling of two UK MEP’s expenses through companies owned by themselves.

What puzzles me is why bloggers from Germany, France, Italy… everywhere in fact, aren’t finding out this sort of thing about their MEPs too. Surely there’s not a lack of material?

It’s hard to understand why the European Parliament should run an office in Scotland. But it does, and it operates from a piece of prime Edinburgh real estate called The Tun (described as an “innovative mixed-use commercial development combining a redundant brewery with a new-built element”).

The Office seems to have time on its hands. On 20 May, campaigner Bob Holman wrote in the Glasgow Herald

One of the latest outcries concerns MEPs voting against having audited reports of their financial dealings made public. Apparently, some MEPs have paid what should be private contributions to their pensions from money claimed for their parliamentary duties. If this is true, it is unlikely that prosecutions will follow.

Christian Aid and similar agencies stand for a different set of values. Staff do not enrich themselves. Many volunteers offer their time and money freely - they give, and don’t take. They believe in reducing, not maintaining, inequality. They are an antidote to social evils.

This was picked up by John Edward, head of the European Parliament Office. Keen to protect his masters in Brussels, he replied on 23 May, raising an enormous cloud of dust around the auditor’s report, and concluding thus:

“Mr Holman can be reassured the parliament’s services verify all payments to MEPs and their assistants and any possible mistakes or irregularities are addressed.”

Given the context - heavy and detailed discussion of MEPs’ expenses in Europe’s media - this is so blatant a lie that it’s hard to measure the man’s chutzpah. Accounts are audited on a spot check basis. Receipts do not have to be produced. The News of the World has recently exposed the mile-wide loopholes that some MEPs are exploiting to enrich themselves personally.

Two commenters picked this up on the Herald website, and the reponses must have stung. Somebody called Victor writes “your re-assurance is extremely hard to ‘understand’ - even less to seriously believe!”.

But Mr Edward hasn’t made any effort to correct his statement, and why should he? He got twice as many commenters supporting his wild claim. In any case, Propaganda 101 says that a statement doesn’t have to be true - just making the claim is enough to push your message, regardless of any objections. It’s now in the public domain. If you come under serious assault, you move to stage two, explained by Paul Ginsborg in his biography of Silvio Berlusconi:

“…Irene Pivetti, the Northern League’s young and controversial choice as speaker of the House of Deputies, declared how well women had been treated under Fascism.

The rhetorical strategy behind such declarations always follows the same pattern. The statement is first made in brutal and uncompromising fashion. Uproar follows. Depending upon the volume of protest, a partial retraction or “clarification” is then forthcoming. But the damage has been done, and as the wily Christian Democrat Giulio Andreotti once said: ‘A “retraction” always means that a piece of information has been communicated twice’”

Open Europe has a hilarious summary of a survey on parliamentary expenses. They asked UK MEPs six questions about how they spend their staff allowances and whether they are properly accounted for.

This seems to have given some MEPs a fit of outraged indignation. After all, they are special. How dare anyone ask them what they spend taxpayers’ money on? But see how they squirm:

Veteran Conservative MEP Christopher Beazley said, “I would have to question the legality of these questions. What right do you have to ask these?” He argued that MEPs’ taxpayer funded expense claims were not “a public matter”, that it was “private”. Ironically, he also insisted that, “everything I do is as transparent as possible”.

Lib Dem MEP Bill Newton-Dunn accused us of “muck-raking”, and of being “biased”.

Labour MEP Richard Corbett’s office claimed that Open Europe was “not interested” in transparency and that we were just “nut cracking”.

Conservative MEP Malcolm Harbour also accused us of “muck-raking” and threatened: “If you value your relationship with the Conservative Party I would recommend that you think very carefully about continuing with this… I regard the whole exercise as completely unnecessary.”

Only 19 out of 79 MEPs were prepared to provide full answers. 14 MEPs replied, but gave only partial answers, while 46 simply refused to answer the questions.

The full breakdown is available from Open Europe’s website.

The BBC and the European Voice have now “revealed” that Paul van Buitenen has written to OLAF giving the names of two MEPs (one serving, one former) who’ve been fiddling their expenses.

You’d expect European Voice to have been on the case a little earlier, considering they have paid reporters supposed to be keeping their fingers on the pulse. I reported this development on 14 April, and it’s taken the mainstream days to catch up.

What they should now be doing is digging into the juiciest detail of Mr van Buitenen’s allegation, which is that MEPs may have diverted EU money to funding domestic election campaigns.

When I say “EU money”, of course, I mean our money.

The rumours have been floating around for some weeks that allowances to MEPs have been diverted to fund political campaigning in Germany. My understanding is that there exists a second report on Parliamentary expenses, containing allegations even worse than the original auditor’s report that made the headlines in February.

However, I notice that Paul van Buitenen has also published a letter to the President of the EU Parliament pointing out the total inactivity and unwillingness to investigate. Along the way, he mentions the following examples of MEPs sticking their nose into the trough too enthusiastically:

kickback payments, fake places of residence, irregular pension benefits, faking of signatures, abuses of visitors group reimbursements and funding of campaign activities.

What does this mean? Well, not much on its own. It’s a small step towards exposing what fraudulent MEPs get up to, and yet another minor embarrassment for the president Hans-Gert Pöttering.

As I’ve suggested before, Pöttering is the main obstacle to creating a transparent payments system in Parliament. The fact that he refuses to respond to van Buitenen’s complaints only confirms this.

UPDATE: We now have the text of the resolution, which - as Bruno Waterfield suggested - boils down to a demand that MEPs pay contractors via accountants. This means that because some MEPs simply can’t be trusted to play the game, they need to be overseen by somebody else who can be. I imagine the theory is that accountants are closer within reach of the law and professional transparency standards and can be collared more easily if things look wrong.

The other thing is that MEPs would no longer be allowed to employ people in their families, something which will piss off the Brits.

These demands simply highlight the extraordinary situation MEPs enjoy. Those in the private sector would be amazed if they knew what goes on.

=== Original post:

I’m playing catch-up here, as I missed Bruno Waterfield’s Telegraph report of an oral resolution Parliament’s budgetary control committee passed on Wednesday night. 

In essence:

“Euro-MPS are to be banned from employing their relatives or paying family-owned companies staff allowances in a reform of their £125 million annual expenses.”

The comments to Bruno’s piece evidence a certain scepticism.

I’m trying to get hold of a copy of the resolution.