The EU’s reply to Qatargate: Nips, tucks and paperwork

STRASBOURG — The European Parliament’s response to Qatargate: Fight self-indulgence with paperwork.

When Belgian police made sweeping arrests and recovered 1.5 million from Parliament members in a cash-for-influence probe last December, it sparked mass clamoring for a deep wipe of the institution, which has long languished with lax values and transparency rules, and plane weaker enforcement.

Seven months later, the Parliament and its president, Roberta Metsola, can certainly requirement to have tightened some rules — but the results are not much to shout about. With accused MEPs Eva Kaili and Marc Tarabella when in the Parliament and plane voting on ethics changes themselves, the reforms lack the political dial to take the sting out of a scandal that Euroskeptic forces have leaped on superiority of the EU referendum next year.

“Judge us on what we’ve washed-up rather [than] on what we didn’t,” Metsola told journalists older this month, arguing that Parliament has make-believe swiftly where it could.

While the Parliament can requirement some limited improvements, calls for a increasingly profound overhaul in the EU’s only directly elected institution — including increasingly serious enforcement of existing rules — have been met with finger-pointing, blame-shifting and bureaucratic slow-walking.

The Parliament dodged some headline-worthy proposals in the process. It declined to launch its own inquiry into what really happened, it decided not to gravity MEPs to declare their resources and it won’t be stripping any convicted MEPs of their gold-plated pensions.

Instead, the institution favored increasingly minimal nips and tucks. The rule changes value to much increasingly setup and increasingly potential watchtower wedding to spot malfeasance sooner — but little in the way of stronger enforcement of values rules for MEPs.

EU Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly, who investigates complaints well-nigh EU wardship lamented that the initial sense of urgency to prefer strict reforms had “dissipated.” Without handing the EU a reputational blow, she argued, the scandal’s produce offered a pre-election chance, “to show that lessons have been learned and safeguards have been put in place.”

Former MEP Richard Corbett, who co-wrote the Socialists & Democrats group’s own inquiry into Qatargate and favors increasingly warlike reforms, admitted he isn’t sure whether Parliament will get there.

“The Parliament is getting to grips with this gradually, muddling its way through the ramified field, but it’s too early to say whether it will do what it should,” he said.

Bags of cash

The sense of resignation that criminals will be criminals was only one of the starting points that shaped the Parliament’s response.

“We will never be worldly-wise to prevent people taking tons of cash. This is human nature. What we have to do is create a protection network,” said Raphaël Glucksmann, a French MEP who sketched out some longer-term recommendations he hopes the Parliament will take up.

Another is that the Belgian authorities’ painstaking judicial investigation is still ongoing, with three MEPs charged and a fourth facing imminent questioning. Much is unknown well-nigh how the so-called venality ring really operated, or what the countries Qatar, Morocco and Mauritania really got for their bribes.

On top of that, Parliament was occasionally looking outward rather than inward for people to blame.

Metsola’s message in the wake of the scandal was that EU democracy was “under attack” by foreign forces. The accent on “malign actors, linked to autocratic third countries” set the stage for the Parliament’s response to Qatargate: vituperation foreign interference, not an integrity deficit.

Instead of creating a new panel to investigate how self-indulgence might have steered Parliament’s work, Parliament repurposed an existing committee on foreign interference and misinformation to probe the matter. The result was a set of medium- and long-term recommendations that focus as much on blocking IT contractors from Russia and China as they do on holding MEPs subject — and they remain merely recommendations.

Metsola did moreover turn inward, presenting a 14-point plan in January she labeled as “first steps” of a promised values overhaul. The measures are a finely tailored lattice-work of technical measures that could make it harder for Qatargate to happen again, primarily by making it harder to lobby the Parliament undetected.

The inside icon in Qatargate, an Italian ex-MEP tabbed Pier Antonio Panzeri, enjoyed unfettered wangle to the Parliament, using it to requite prominence to his human rights NGO Fight Impunity, which held events and plane struck a collaboration deal with the institution.

This 14-point package, which Metsola supposed is now “done,” includes a new entry register, a six-month cooling-off period banning ex-MEPs from lobbying their colleagues, tighter rules for events, stricter scrutiny of human rights work — all tailored to ensure a future Panzeri hits a tripwire and can be spotted sooner.

Notably, however, an initial idea to ban former MEPs from lobbying for two years without leaving office — which would mirror the European Commission’s rules — instead turned into just a six-month “cooling off” period.

Internal divisions

Behind the scenes, the house remains sharply divided over just how much transpiration is needed. Many MEPs resisted worthier changes to how they self-mastery their work, despite Metsola’s promise in December that there would be “no merchantry as usual,” which she repeated in July.

The limited yearing reflects an treatise — pushed by a powerful subset of MEPs, primarily in Metsola’s large, center-right European People’s Party group — that waffly that “business as usual” will only tie the hands of innocent politicians while doing little to stop the few with criminal intent. They’re bolstered by the fact that the Socialists & Democrats remain the only group touched by the scandal.

“There were voices in this house who said, ‘Do nothing, these things will unchangingly happen, things are fine as they are,’” Metsola said. Some of the changes, she said, had been “resisted for decades” surpassing Qatargate momentum pushed them through.

The Parliament once has some of the Continent’s highest standards for legislative bodies, said Rainer Wieland, a long-serving EPP member from Germany who sits on the several key rule-making committees: “I don’t think anyone can hold a candle to us.”

Those who are still complaining, he widow in a debate last week, “are living in wonderland.”

Wieland holds lots of sway over the reforms. He chairs an internal working group on the Parliament’s rules that feeds into the Parliament’s powerful Committee on Constitutional Affairs, where Metsola’s 14-point plan will be translated into cold, nonflexible rules.

Those rule changes are expected to be unexplored by the full Parliament in September.

The measures will uplift existing transparency rules significantly. The lead MEP on a legislative file will soon have to declare (and deal with) potential conflicts of interest, including those coming from their “emotional life.” And increasingly MEPs will have to publish their meetings related to parliamentary business, including those with representatives from outside the EU.

Members will moreover have to unroll outside income over 5,000 — with spare details well-nigh the sector if they work in something like law or consulting.

Negotiators moreover well-set to double potential penalties for breaches: MEPs can lose their daily wage and be barred from most parliamentary work for up to 60 days.

Yet the Parliament’s track record punishing MEPs who unravel the rules is virtually nonexistent.

As it stands, an internal newsy committee can recommend a punishment, but it’s up to the president to impose it. Of 26 breaches of transparency rules identified over the years, not one MEP has been punished. (Metsola has imposed penalties for things like harassment and hate speech.)

And hopes for an outside integrity cop to help with enforcement were dashed when a long-delayed Commission proposal for an EU-wide self-sustaining values soul was scaled back.

Stymied by legal constraints and left-right divides within the Parliament, the Commission opted for suggesting a standards-setting panel that, at best, would pressure institutions into largest policing their own rules.

“I really hate listening to some, expressly members of the European Parliament, who say that ‘Without having the values body, we cannot behave ethical[ly],’” Commission Vice President for Values and Transparency Věra Jourová lamented in June.

Metsola, for her part, has pledged to pinion to the newsy committee’s recommendations going forward. But MEPs from wideness the political spectrum flagged the president’s well-constructed discretion to mete out punishments as unsustainable.

“The problem was not (and never really was) [so] much the details of the rules!!! But the enforcement,” French Green MEP Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield — who sits in the working group — wrote to POLITICO.

Wieland, the German EPP member on the rule-making committees, presented the situation increasingly matter-of-factly: Parliament had washed-up what it said it would do.

“We fully delivered” on Metsola’s plan, Wieland told POLITICO in an interview. “Not increasingly than that.”