EUROPEAN DIARY: THE EUROPEAN Parliament marks its 50th birthday this week at its monthly plenary session in Strasbourg, which will see some of Europe's top politicians make celebratory speeches about its role in boosting European democracy, writes JAMIE SMYTH
President of the parliament Hans-Gert Pöttering, European Commission president José Manuel Barroso and Slovenia's prime minister Janez Jansa, who currently chairs the presidency of the union, will laud the achievements of an assembly which first sat on March 19th, 1958. One issue they probably will not address is an escalating scandal over MEPs' expenses, which is threatening to undermine the integrity of a body that is supposed to be one of the key watchdogs over EU spending.
News of the scandal leaked out last month when a member of the parliament's committee on budgetary control, British MEP Chris Davies, told journalists about a secret internal audit that revealed millions of euro in abuses of MEPs' staff allowances.
Parliament administrators and senior MEPs did their best to cover up the report by forcing MEPs on the committee to sign a declaration of confidentiality before they were shown the report, which is kept permanently in a room where notes cannot be taken.
"This report is dynamite - and makes the Derek Conway affair at Westminster look like small change," said Davies, referring to a recent scandal in Britain where a Conservative MP employed his son - a full-time student - as a political researcher.
Yet, despite the furore over auditors discovering that some MEPs had paid for non-existent staff, had not made social security payments to staff, and in one case paid a staff member a Christmas bonus worth 19 times their monthly salary, the committee voted by 21 votes to 14 not to discuss the report. MEPs belonging to the two main political groups, the EPP-ED and the Socialists, voted against disclosure.
The amount of taxpayers' money allocated to MEPs to hire staff to help them run offices in Brussels and in their home state is significant, amounting to about €200,000 a year.
But the procedures in place to ensure that MEPs do not pocket some of this cash are not strong enough to prevent abuses, say some whistleblowers.
"The system for managing assistants' allowances and the way it is managed allow these derailments to take place," says Paul van Buitenen, an MEP on the committee who, when working as a commission official in 1998, provided key information on abuses that led to the resignation of the Santer commission in 1999.
Van Buitenen, who has published a summary of the secret audit report on his website, says the rules governing staff allowances are so flexible that it is almost impossible to tackle any abuses by MEPs.
One of the key problems is that MEPs can set up service provider firms to apply for the assistant allowance from parliament with precious little scrutiny over how they spend the money, says van Buitenen, who could face disciplinary action from the parliament for publicising the audit report.
But it is not just the vast sums of money available under the parliamentary assistance allowance that are almost untraceable.
A range of other perks payable to MEPs, covering travel, accommodation, food and entertainment expenses are also kept away from the prying eyes of constituents and journalists, according to parliamentary rules.
Unlike in Ireland, where details of TDs' expenses are regularly revealed under the Freedom of Information Act, in Brussels the authorities refuse to detail the public money spent by MEPs. Last week, the EU ombudsman - the EU official charged with safeguarding citizens' rights when they engage with EU institutions - renewed his call on the parliament to publish MEPs' expenses, insisting it would boost democracy in the EU.
But a bureau of 15 senior MEPs wrote to him last week rejecting his recommendation. They argued in a letter that revealing their expenses could infringe the privacy of MEPs' assistants, and publishing details of travel expenses could enable people to draw conclusions "as to the political activity of the member as well as his/her sources of information".
There are some face-saving efforts being made. For the first time the parliament will publish what expenses MEPs are entitled to on its website and the president of the parliament has ordered a review of the assistants' allowance system.
The Irish Times asked all 13 Irish MEPs if they would be willing to reveal their total expenses during 2007. Most said they favoured reform of the system but none was able to give a detailed breakdown of what they spent last year or in 2006.
It appears that full transparency will not be achieved in the parliament until a few more birthdays have been celebrated.