The “Qatargate” corruption scandal rocking the European Parliament is “dramatic and damaging for the credibility of the European Union” and makes it harder for Brussels to deal with multiple competing crises, European Council President Charles Michel told POLITICO in an exclusive interview.
Speaking in his offices in the Europa building in Brussels, Michel said he was very concerned over the charges of criminal enterprise, money laundering and corruption brought by the Belgian police against current and former members of the European Parliament in recent days.
“We first need to learn lessons from this and come up with a package of measures to avoid such things — to prevent corruption in the future,” said Michel, a former Belgian prime minister who is now in his second term as president of the European Council, the body that convenes the leaders of the EU’s 27 member countries.
But the scandal is “making it even more difficult for us to focus on the economic and energy crises that impact the lives of European citizens right now,” he said.
Belgian police have arrested multiple people, including Greek MEP Eva Kaili and her Italian partner, Francesco Giorgi, as well as Italian former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri and Niccolo Figa-Talamanca, secretary-general of a rule-of-law campaign group.
The police have also sealed multiple offices in the Parliament and seized at least €1.5 million in cash following what they say was a year-long, Europe-wide investigation into alleged corruption and money laundering.
Coming just as the football World Cup reached its crescendo in Qatar, the affair has confirmed the image of the petro-kingdom as a malign meddling power and the EU as a murky playground for corrupt, entitled, sanctimonious Eurocrats.
“The EU has only made global headlines a handful of times in the last year — for example when we banned the internal combustion engine and now with this corruption scandal,” Valérie Hayer, a French MEP from President Emmanuel Macron’s party, lamented to POLITICO.
Michel acknowledged that the average European was unlikely to differentiate between the three big branches of the EU — the European Parliament, the European Council he leads and the European Commission, which serves as the executive branch and proposes legislation.
The taint of scandal will make his job far harder as he seeks to “renew the wedding vows of the EU” in the new year and tries to tackle a series of issues he described as “existential for the European project.”
Those include negotiations with the United States over the Inflation Reduction Act subsidy program that has panicked European leaders who worry about their relative economic competitiveness.
If Europe cannot come up with an adequate answer in the coming weeks, then it risks the “fragmentation of the single market,” Michel said. He said the other big problem facing Europe was “overdependency on China and the pressure being applied on us by China.”
As Belgian police launched a second wave of raids on the European Parliament, a stunned Brussels elite has started to grapple with an uncomfortable question at the heart of the Qatar bribery investigation: Just how deep does the rot go?
So far, police inquiries launched by Belgian prosecutor Michel Claise have landed four people in jail, including Parliament Vice President Eva Kaili, on charges of corruption, money laundering and participation in a criminal organization.
After the initial shock of those arrests wore off, several Parliament officials told POLITICO they believed the allegations would be limited to a “few individuals” who had gone astray by allegedly accepting hundreds of thousands of euros in cash from Qatari interests.
But that theory was starting to unravel by Monday evening, as Belgian police carried out another series of raids on Parliament offices just as lawmakers were gathering in Strasbourg, one of European Parliament’s two sites, for their first meeting after news of the arrests broke on Friday.
With 19 residences and offices searched — in addition to Parliament — six people arrested and sums of at least around €1 million recovered, some EU officials and activists said they believed more names would be drawn into the widening dragnet — and that the Qatar bribery scandal was symptomatic of a much deeper and more widespread problem with corruption not just in the European Parliament, but across all the EU institutions.
In Parliament, lax oversight of members’ financial activities and the fact that states were able to contact them without ever logging the encounters in a public register amounts to a recipe for corruption, these critics argued.
Beyond the Parliament, they pointed to the revolving door of senior officials who head off to serve private interests after a stint at the European Commission or Council as proof that tougher oversight of institutions is in order. Others invoked the legacy of the Jacques Santer Commission — which resigned en masse in 1998 — as proof that no EU institution is immune from illegal influence.
“The courts will determine who is guilty, but what’s certain is that it’s not just Qatar, and it’s not just the individuals who have been named who are involved” in foreign influence operations, Raphaël Glucksmann, a French lawmaker from the Socialists and Democrats, who heads a committee against foreign interference in Parliament, told POLITICO in Strasbourg.
Michiel van Hulten, a former lawmaker who now heads Transparency International’s EU office, said that while egregious cases of corruption involving bags of cash were rare, “it’s quite likely that there are names in this scandal that we haven’t heard from yet. There is undue influence on a scale we haven’t seen so far. It doesn’t need to involve bags of cash. It can involve trips to far-flung destinations paid for by foreign organizations — and in that sense there is a more widespread problem.”
Adding to the problem was the fact that Parliament has no built-in protections for internal whistleblowers, despite having voted in favor of such protections for EU citizens, he added. Back in 1998, it was a whistleblower denouncing mismanagement in the Santer Commission who precipitated a mass resignation of the EU executive.
Glucksmann also called for “extremely profound reforms” to a system that allows lawmakers to hold more than one job, leaves oversight of personal finances up to a self-regulating committee staffed by lawmakers, and gives state actors access to lawmakers without having to register their encounters publicly.
European Parliament Vice President Eva Kaili | Jalal Morchidi/EFE via EPA
“If Parliament wants to get out of this, we’ll have to hit hard and undertake extremely profound reforms,” added Glucksmann, who previously named Russia, Georgia and Azerbaijan as countries that have sought to influence political decisions in the Parliament.
To start addressing the problem, Glucksmann called for an ad hoc investigative committee to be set up in Parliament, while other left-wing and Greens lawmakers have urged reforms including naming an anti-corruption vice president to replace Kaili, who was expelled from the S&D group late Monday, and setting up an ethics committee overseeing all EU institutions.
Glass half-full
Others, however, were less convinced that the corruption probe would turn up new names, or that the facts unveiled last Friday spoke to any wider problem in the EU. Asked about the extent of the bribery scandal, one senior Parliament official who asked not to be named in order to discuss confidential deliberations said: “As serious as this is, it’s a matter of individuals, of a few people who made very bad decisions. The investigation and arrests show that our systems and procedures have worked.”
Valérie Hayer, a French lawmaker with the centrist Renew group, struck a similar note, saying that while she was deeply concerned about a “risk for our democracy” linked to foreign interference, she did not believe that the scandal pointed to “generalized corruption” in the EU. “Unfortunately, there are bad apples,” she said.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who’s under fire over her handling of COVID-19 vaccination deals with Pfizer, declined to answer questions about her Vice President Margaritis Schinas’ relations with Qatar at a press briefing, triggering fury from the Brussels press corps.
The Greek commissioner represented the EU at the opening ceremony of the World Cup last month, and has been criticized by MEPs over his tweets in recent months, lavishing praise on Qatar’s labor reforms.
European Commission Vice President Margaritis Schinas | Aris Oikonomou/AFP via Getty Images
Asked about the Commission’s response to the Qatar corruption scandal engulfing the European Parliament, and in particular the stance of Schinas, von der Leyen was silent on the Greek commissioner.
Von der Leyen did, however, appear to lend support to the creation of an independent ethics body that could investigate wrongdoing across all EU bodies.
“These rules [on lobbying by state actors] are the same in all three EU institutions,” said the senior Parliament official, referring to the European Commission, Parliament and the European Council, the roundtable of EU governments.
The split over how to address corruption shows how even in the face of what appears to be an egregious example of corruption, members of the Brussels system — comprised of thousands of well-paid bureaucrats and elected officials, many of whom enjoy legal immunity as part of their jobs — seeks to shield itself against scrutiny that could threaten revenue or derail careers.
