This really is an appalling scandal that doesn't get the coverage it deserves. If the EU were a private company, its directors would be in jail.
BBC Radio 4 Today Programme
15 Nov 2005
0810 For eleven years running the EU auditors have looked at the European Union's account books and refused to approve the accounts. Why is so little being done about it?
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(Here in full as the Indie annoyingly pulls its articles from freeview)
EU accounts fail to clear watchdog for 11th year
Independent
15 November 2005
The European Union's financial watchdog has refused to give the annual euro-accounts the all-clear - for the 11th year running.
A report from the European Court of Auditors today repeats familiar concerns about the accuracy of the books on the 2004 budget totalling nearly £70 billion. And it points the finger at member states themselves more than Brussels - because about 80% of EU spending is conducted by national and regional authorities.
The auditors have acknowledged European Commission efforts to improve the situation by bringing in accounting reforms to answer complaints that lax procedures could be wide open to fraud and mismanagement. But yet again this year they say they cannot give a formal "Statement of Assurance" about the validity of the annual accounts.
Conservative MEP James Elles warned that the accountants' refusal to clear the books was in danger of becoming a permanent feature of the EU unless member states faced up to their responsibility to ensure euro-funds channelled through them were better accounted for. And he said Britain's EU presidency had been a missed opportunity to tackle the problem.
Last week Chancellor Gordon Brown, chairing talks between EU finance ministers, made clear it was for the auditors to set out ways to improve the procedures for clearing the accounts. Ministers said the system of verification needed updating and rejected Commission calls for national authorities to take more responsibility. They insist the auditors' failure year after year to endorse the budget is because of the technical rules governing the delivery of a "Statement of Assurance" rather than a result of widespread fraud.
But Mr Elles, Tory spokesman on budgetary control in the European Parliament, said the blame rested with EU governments. "The commission always gets the blame but the situation is more complicated than that. Eighty per cent of EU money is spent at national level. Member states should not be passing the buck. "The British presidency of the EU has had a good opportunity to grasp this problem. But Gordon Brown is yet again saying one thing and doing another. He says he wants everyone to do their bit to improve the situation but he's not prepared to take the lead himself."
Mr Elles added: "Faced with an opportunity to take the lead in ensuring member states are held responsible for funds disbursed at national level, the UK government has dodged the issue."
Chris Davies, leader of the British Liberal Democrat MEPs and a member of the European Parliament's Budget Control Committee, said: "The finger of blame should be pointed towards Gordon Brown and his fellow finance ministers who have refused to accept responsibility for the money spent by their own administrations.
"The public will assume that fraud is widespread and the Brussels bureaucracy incompetent but in fact the EU administration is now subjected to greater scrutiny than that of any government in Europe." He added: "Despite many improvements made in accounting procedures the auditors have refused to specify what steps must be taken if the EU accounts are to be given a clean bill of health. It's like telling an athlete to run a race without announcing the distance."
4 comments:
And not much prospect of things improving, apparently.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/16/weu16.xml
Watchdog questions EU accounts
Telegraph
16/11/2005
Sod Cameron, I'm voting for Crawford. This is brilliant:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1920117,00.html
Crikey! FO speaks truth about Europe
Sunday Times
December 11, 2005
[Crawford] suggests putting a children’s alarm clock on the conference table and giving delegates an hour to accept Britain’s offer [of rebate for CAP reform]. If it is not accepted, he suggested, Britain would be able to walk away with its rebate intact. It would then be able to use money that it was prepared to deduct from its rebate to fund projects directly in former eastern bloc countries.
Crawford estimates that it would be equivalent to twice as much spent through the EU and that Britain’s help would go much further, faster and more efficiently to the countries concerned. There will not be the loss of money in “all the bollocky EU bureaucracy” and “sticky transaction costs, local and Brussels corruption, overheads and other rubbish”. Crawford describes the common agricultural policy (CAP) as “the most stupid, immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take communism”.
MEPs vote to cover up expenses inquiry
Telegraph
23/04/2008
Members of the European Parliament voted yesterday to cover up a report showing widespread abuse of allowances worth £125 million every year. They also threw out demands from a public information watchdog for scrutiny of generous pension perks.
...
In February, The Daily Telegraph revealed the existence of a secret internal audit by the European Parliament that found endemic irregularities with staff allowances, which are worth £160,000 a year to each MEP. Many MEPs use the public funds, meant for parliamentary assistants, to legally employ close relatives or to divert the payments to family-owned companies with little or no scrutiny of the work carried out.
Chris Davies, a Liberal Democrat MEP, attacked the latest cover-up as bringing "discredit and dishonour upon the entire parliament". "Far from cleaning up their act, a majority of MEPs seem intent on allowing greed and self-interest to triumph over the proper financial management of public money," he said.
The parliament rejected calls, supported by the European Ombudsman, for the names of 407 MEPs who receive a second voluntary pension to be published. Officials have suggested that "a significant number" of MEPs illegally pay their personal contributions from their office allowances.
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Secret report reveals massive MEP fraud
The Times
February 26, 2008
A report on the misuse of expenses by MEPs is likely to be kept secret by the European Parliament despite growing calls for it to be made public. The internal audit exposes money-making scams without naming individuals and shows “embezzlement and fraud on a massive scale”, according to the MEP who revealed its existence.
EU Referendum blog writes that the current travails of the Royal Mail are all the fault of the EU. Really? Can that honestly be the reason? If so why wouldn't the media mention it in any of their reports? I really don't know what to make of all that.
Anyway, here's the piece about it, read for yourself.
"The elephant lives!
They are at it again … ignoring the elephant, even though it is alive and kicking – and dumping dirty great turds on the carpet.
Leading the fray in the eyes-wide-shut brigade is the BBC which retails the news that Postcomm's chairman Nigel Stapleton is calling for Royal Mail to be partly privatised "to safeguard the quality of the UK's mail delivery service".
He is warning that Royal Mail's financial difficulties would worsen unless bold action was taken and, without private sector involvement, the company "may require a government subsidy".
Apart from anything else, Stapleton's comment in the respect is, shall we say, as tad tendentious. He must know, better than most, that any idea of a subsidy is not on the cards – without the approval of the EU, which would be unlikely to give it. It would, in this context, be deemed illegal state aid.
But then Stapleton, according to The Daily Mail (which also does not mention the elephant) is comparing the Royal Mail's plight to "a person climbing up a very steep hill with a rucksack on his back filled with rocks", neglecting to say that the "rocks" are the postal services directives.
Is then a coincidence, one asks, that Stapelton should also happily chirp that, "Private sector partnerships had worked in other European countries," which is setting up precisely the agenda set up by the EU commission: first you break up the business; you allow it to be taken over by cross-border providers; then you move in to create a pan-European regulator on the grounds that the services can no longer be regulated nationally.
But it is the BBC that kindly reminds us that Royal Mail's troubles started with the ending of its 350-year monopoly at the start of 2006 – without mentioning why – telling us that other licensed operators were then given the right to collect and deliver mail, while the Royal Mail it is still obliged to deliver letters to and from anywhere in the UK at a uniform tariff. It is this which has given rise to a loss of £279m in the year to the end of March.
This gets agreement from Jeff Randall in the Daily Telegraph, who gets another comment piece on the issue. But, unlike his previous op-ed there is no mention of the elephant at all.
Instead, bizarrely, having referred to the problems of the universal service, and the possibility of reducing the burden, he notes that this is "enshrined in law". Amazingly though, he then goes on to say: "But laws can be changed."
That this man should make this comment is almost incredible. A man who told us that: "There exists no commercial, political or social problem that meddling by the European Union cannot make worse…", must know that the "law" to which he refers is EU law. As such, it cannot be changed - certainly not to suit Royal Mail.
Has Randall been got at, or have they applied a new coat of "stealth" paint to the elephant, so that it is invisible to him as well? I think we should be told."
What I can't make up my mind about is if this fella is a mad cravate wearing, pipe smokin' loon or if he just knows something I don't. Here's another piece from the same blog about what he perceives as the EU's ultimate ambition for the postal service.
"The destruction phase
It would be churlish to do anything other than applaud the opening of Jeff Randall's op-ed on the Royal Mail in The Daily Telegraph today. "There exists no commercial, political or social problem that meddling by the European Union cannot make worse," he writes.
With that sentiment we can hardly disagree – having many times expressed something similar – and nor can we argue with his premise that, "Those who doubt this assertion might care to look at what's happened to the United Kingdom's mail system and post office network since the EU Directives of 1997 and 2002 …".
Thus far, so good. At last, we have a mainstream journalist who actually recognises the role of the EU in the destruction of our postal services, something his colleagues manifestly failed to do.
From there, however, Randall goes badly wrong in adding a qualifier to his sentence, asserting that the EU Directives, "…set out to improve the quality of postal services across member countries." That was never their intention.
The trouble with Randall and his ilk is that, although they are basically "on side", they have never really got to grips with the nature of the EU and its true (and only) agenda – political integration.
In that context, the postal services directives have exactly the same agenda as all the other so-called "liberalising" instruments, whether they are dealing with energy (see here), rail services, telecommunications, or whatever. The intent is to break up national monopolies, not for the sake of it, but in order to recreate then on a European level, under the direct control of the EU commission.
Thus, the attack on national monopolies is not an attack on the monopolies, per se but an attack on nationalism – it is an attack on the nation state, an attempt to reduce the power and influence of the member states. As such, the EU has no rooted objection to monopolies – it is, after all, itself a monopoly. Its apparent enthusiasm for "competition" is simply a smokescreen to gull free-market liberals into supporting its deeper agenda.
However, the great genius of the commission – as I have been wont to observe – is its realisation that it is no longer necessary to nationalise something in order to own it. Basically, it has developed a system of nationalisation by regulation. It you have complete control over an industry, you get all the benefits of ownership without needing the title deeds.
So it is with postal services, the EU objective is to break up the national monopolies. As an interim stage, it will encourage "competition" but is particularly looking for cross-border enterprises which operate across the EU, in as many member states as possible. That then legitimises supranational control and puts the commission in the dominant position.
Before too long, we will have a European postal service - but it will be messy, delivered by multiple providers, albeit under the control of the EU. The final stage – decades into the future – is then to "rationalise" and "consolidate" the market, slimming down the number of providers until a few megaliths service the entire (European) system under the benign control of the Platonic guardians in Brussels.
To achieve that final cover, though, the EU must first destroy that which exists, and it is well down that path with Royal Mail.
This brings us back to Randall. He warns that, "Unless dozy ministers wake up to this fact, it won't be long before they are sounding the Last Post over the grave of Royal Mail's Universal Service." He adds that: "It's not necessary and we must not allow it to happen."
But what he predicts is what is intended – it is necessary and that is the desired outcome. Before it can build its European dream the EU must first destroy what exists. We are in the destruction phase. For sure, we must not allow it to happen, but "we" are no longer in control."
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