Santer's position is hardly `blanchis'

WHEN the President of the European Commission, Mr Jacques Santer, faced the press on Tuesday morning it was to tell them that, although they were resigning, the Commission felt hard done by, and that he personally had been completely "cleared" by the committee of wise men.

His performance was woeful in failing to convey the Commission's determination that it should be replaced fast, with the result that many papers ran stories saying Mr Santer wanted to stay on to serve out his term. And so the exercise had to be repeated the following day with another declaration making clear that they really did want to go.

"We have resigned and have no desire or intention of remaining in office a moment longer than we have to," the statement said.

Mr Santer should have understood by now that you have to spell everything out for the Brussels press corps. Otherwise, give them even a glimmer of an ambiguity and Smyth's Universal Law of the Press says they will automatically conjure up the worst-case scenario as fact.

This is a press corps that has written obituaries on the euro so many times that the most felicitous cat would be jealous of the currency's myriad lives. Yet there was something apt, if sad, in Mr Santer's performance. This most congenial man, perhaps too congenial for his own and the Commission's good, will depart in the same indecisive way he has ruled the EU's executive.

And Mr Santer's case was not helped by the mistranslation by interpreters in the press room of his words - his claim to have been blanchis should have been translated as "cleared" rather than the more extravagant "whiter than white".

Mutterings of dissent in the press room were met by an insistence by Mr Santer that if we were thinking of the matter of the Commission's Security Service perhaps we should look to his predecessor. Indeed, Mr Jacques Delors does deserve some of the opprobrium heaped on the current Commission. Their's was the misfortune to inherit an administrative and political culture, fashioned by others, but whose time had passed.

But the fact that Mr Delors is also guilty does not absolve the current President.

The Commission Security Service is a matter of direct responsibility of the President and his immediate staff. How could it be then that a situation in that service could arise where, the report describes, there was a complete loss of control and the effective emergence of a "state within a state"?

The service is responsible for the security of the Commission's many buildings and provides occasional security guards for individual commissioners during big events or abroad. Its budget is not insignificant - in the six years from 1992 to 1997 it spent close on £63 million.

In August, 1997, the Belgian paper De Morgen made a number of serious allegations against the service. It suggested that, when the security contract for the Commission had been given in 1992 to the IMS Group 4/Securitas company, standard tendering procedures had been seriously flouted.

Group 4 had been allowed to adjust its tender after the closing date, some of the price information in the contract was also altered without the Commission's committee on procurement being made aware of it, and the security office had used the company to recruit a number of "ghost" personnel, bypassing normal procedures.

In investigating the allegations the Commission's fraud unit, UCLAF, took as its starting point an audit report of 1993 which had yet to be made public and largely confirmed the allegations, concluding that there was no real budget control over the office. No action had been taken.

Meanwhile, the director of the service was rubbishing all media stories of irregularities.

By December, 1997, UCLAF reported on what it considered serious irregularities in the recruitment of "ghost" staff circumventing staff procedures to get round internal staff shortages. No conclusion was possible on the contract as the company was refusing access to the paperwork.

A final report in March, 1998, concluded there had indeed been manipulation of the contract and it found that "a large number of persons were recruited on the recommendations of various persons in authority and some of them had close relations with the Assistant to the Director of the Security Office". The report was passed on to the President of the Commission's staff with a recommendation from the Commissioner responsible for anti-fraud activities, Ms Anita Gradin, that the director be suspended. In April the file was passed to the Belgian prosecuting authorities by the Secretary General to the Commission, Mr Carlo Trojan.

In November the authorities asked the Commission to waive the diplomatic immunity of eight officials to allow prosecution.

Despite an internal recommendation for disciplinary action against the director none has yet taken place.

The committee of wise men's report last week also noted with concern that the service had recruited in the late 1980s an incompetent ex-colonel in the Belgian police with alarming connections to the far-right.

Discipline was a serious concern with even Mr Delors complaining in 1992 that on a visit to the Seville World Exhibition he found 10 guards on the Commission stand despite the fact the Spanish were providing security. The Commission employees were criticised for their behaviour, feet on tables, heavy drinking, etc. Complaints were ignored by the director.

A culture of impunity seems to have pervaded the office, ignored by the President's cabinet, and no doubt helped by the fact that the director could do small favours for senior officials such as getting parking fines and drink driving fines cancelled or providing drivers or even gardeners. Recruitment to the office was largely confined to what the report calls a "private club" for former Brussels police officers.

And, the report notes, guards even reported to their boss on who was visiting the UCLAF offices.

To cap it all despite concerns about the first contract, when it came up for renewal in 1997 a German bid was put aside for "technical" reasons. The contract was awarded to a Belgian firm on the basis of a £1.2 million higher tender.

While the committee of wise men found that the President of the Commission reacted promptly in 1997 after allegations appeared in the press, "audit results" as early as 1993 could have made it possible to have identified the nature of the problems in the Security Office much earlier.

"The prime responsibility of Mr Santer in this case is that neither he, as the official nominally responsible for the Security Office, nor his private office took any meaningful interest in its functioning. As a result no supervision was exercised and a `state within a state' was allowed to develop."

Blanchis?