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.

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.

Bruno Waterfield’s excellent post hits the nail on the head:

The focus on “transparency” and lobbying entirely, spectacularly and, one suspects, deliberately misses the point about what is wrong with the EU. It shifts the focus from the EU’s lack of democracy and accountability to a priggish, childish obsession with money and the corporate world.

This is the point.

None (that’s N, O, N, E) of the executive bodies of the EU, European Council, Councils of ministers, Coreper, the Commission, all bodies that exercise power over us the people, keep a proper public record of their debates or decisions.

Most of the documents related to the exercise, of what are told is, public authority here in Brussels belong to the private, closed world of bureaucrats and diplomats. Requests for access are invariably countered with contemptuously smooth refusals in order “to protect the decision-making process”. From who? From us, the public.

At the moment, for example, there is an intense debate on the creation of an EU president and a euro-diplomatic corp. Every body is talking about it and there are plenty of (secret) documents. But where’s the public record?

At some point there some “Council Conclusions” will emerge recording the fact of a decision. But there will be no record of the debates, who said what or the alternatives that were on offer.

There’s more.

To be fair, the Greens have taken something of a stand on the narrower issue of lobbying Parliament. They abstained from voting on the resolution, says Caroline Lucas.

Commenting on the result of the vote, UK Green MEP Dr Caroline Lucas: “The vote on new rules for lobbyists in the European Parliament today showed just how powerful and effective the lobbyists really are. Although the adopted proposal is a step in the right direction, requiring all lobbyists to register for the first time, it is far from guaranteeing full transparency.

The European Parliament is currently sitting, and this week is chiefly concerned with the 2006 budget discharge.

Troublemaking MEPs have also kept alive the issue of fraud in Parliament, and specifically the misuse of expenses, but it’s clear there’s continued resistance to doing anything about it. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, and MEPs don’t vote for transparency.

Here’s Chris Davies:

The European Parliament today voted against the publication of a report by its auditors which has revealed widespread abuse by MEPs of funds intended to be used for the payment of their staff.

MEPs in Strasbourg strengthened their secretive posture by rejecting proposals for auditors’ reports to be made public as a matter of principle.

They also rejected calls backed by the Parliamentary Ombudsman for the names of the 407 members of the Voluntary Pension Fund to be made public.

The Parliament pays €27,720 each year into the pension fund of the members concerned, and they are supposed to make a private contribution of a further €13,860 each year.

However, it is believed that a significant number of MEPs pay their personal contributions from money allocated for their parliamentary duties - a practice described as “embezzlement” by whistleblower UK MEP Chris Davies.

I’ll be rounding up the various budgetary problems Parliament’s been dealing with, or rather not dealing with, and providing summary posts. However, I need to understand them myself first, and this isn’t helped by the fact that the Parliament’s website isn’t working properly at the moment.

Well, well, well, here’s a surprise: Richard Corbett MEP wants to restrict the type of questions MEPs can table in Parliament.

“Richard Corbett of the Socialist Group […] has proposed that written questions to the Commission be limited to three a month per MEP. He says this would allow the EU executive more breathing space, as it is required to answer such questions within six weeks.

Corbett also wants to set certain guidelines so that, at the very least, questions on issues that have nothing to do with the EU would be inadmissible.”

Asked by Euractiv why he wants to stop MEPs asking questions, Richard admits that it’s partly because he’s pissed off with arch-eurosceptic Robert Kilroy-Silk.

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.

Daniel Hannan points us in the direction of this FT article from 2 April.

“Only one in 20 of the 785 MEPs can lay claim to at least a decade in business, while 86 per cent have no experience of any duration…

Only four of the 27 European commissioners claim any business experience and, in each case, this was of less than five years’ duration.”

Daniel admits that he too has no experience of business. But then he says

“let me enter a plea of mitigation. I never presume to tell businesses what to do. Over nine years in the European Parliament, I have never once proposed a new law or a new regulation. I have voted consistently against measures that would burden companies or reduce consumer choice. If only all my colleagues could say the same.”

Which, if accurate (update: see Jon’s comment to this post), seems a fair response.

Daniel identifies the issue as being

“…that many MEPs see legislation as chiefly declamatory: an opportunity to signal that they care about something, to “send out a message”. Never having worked in the private sector, they literally cannot imagine the impact that their rules will have on small firms operating within tight profit margins: not just the straight compliance costs, but the hassle, the record-keeping, the mornings off to show the inspector round.”

This is certainly one of the problems. But one has to acknowledge that it’s very difficult to summon the evidence to fight against over-regulation. Various academics have tried to quantify the impact of red tape on business (particularly the Dutch), but unintended consequences are by their very nature unpredictable.

Hence a law-maker can easily say “this will be the beneficial effect of my proposed law, ain’t it grand?”, but opponents have a hard time pointing out the possible risks.

In other words, it’s easier making a law than not making a law.

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.

Here is the press release from yesterday’s meeting of the EU Parliament’s constitutional affairs committee.

“A mandatory public register for lobbyists, common to the Council, Commission and Parliament and providing for “full financial disclosure”, was proposed by the Constitutional Affairs committee on Tuesday. Lobbyists would also have to comply with a code of conduct and face sanctions if they infringed it.”

The proposal was passed with three abstentions, eighteen in favour, and one MEP voting against. I’m curious to know who that one MEP is…