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.