MEPs under pressure to disclose payments to assistants[fr][de] 

The van Buitenen paper, published on his website on 5 March, identifies contracts provided to assistants through a service provider as those which bear the highest risk of manipulation, because they remain vague regarding the tasks the assistants are supposed to fulfil. 

For instance, no clause limits the monthly payments that can be made to a single contractor. The MEP's summary reveals a case in which a single assistant received a total salary of €15,496, provided through a service provider, which is the monthly amount every MEP receives to pay his staff. 

In addition, the report lists cases in which payments were made to a service provider carrying out activities without any relation to the Parliament's activities, such as the timber trade, or where the organisation serving as a service provider in fact belonged to the MEP himself. 

Among the 167 payments studied, the internal auditor also claimed to have found 42 'lay-off' payments, applicable in cases where the assistants had to leave because their MEP did not get re-elected. One assistant, for instance, received lay-off payments amounting to almost €9,000, accumulating payments received from 12 different MEPs during his three-month notice period. 

The report also looked into 21 so-called 'one-off' payments. For 18 of these no documentation was provided and in five cases, the payments accounted for between three and 19 times the monthly salary of a single MEP. In one case, payments were made without deducting tax or social security. 

Dutch Green MEP Paul van Buitenen, a member of the Budgetary Control Committee, said that the results of the report were "shocking". Asked for his motivation in leaking the results, van Buitenen said that he had asked Parliament officials several times to follow up on the report's recommendations but simply "did not see anything happening". Asked whether he was afraid of the potential impact on Parliament's image with the next elections just 15 months away, van Buitenen replied that keeping the results secret would be even more damaging to the image of the institution. 

Last December's Eurobarometer revealed that citizens have lost trust in the European institutions. However, the figures were higher for those who trust them than those who do not (EurActiv 19/12/07). 

Martin Schulz, German leader of the Socialist group in the Parliament, criticised the disclosure of the auditor's report, saying that it displays a disregard for internal rules. He, however, underlined that he was strongly supporting the recommendations of the report, particularly regarding the adoption of an assistants' statute. 

British Liberal Democrat MEP Chris Davies,  a substitute on the Budgetary Control Committee, told the Financial Times that "these allegations […] should lead to the imprisonment of a number of MEPs," calling it "fraud and embezzlement on a massive scale". 

The office of Nils Lundgren, the Swedish Vice-Chairman of the Committee and a member of the ID Group, showed sympathy for van Buitenen's cause of increasing transparency, but chose to respect Parliament's rules first, which prohibit the publication of internal documents without approval by the secretariat. Lundgren said that he had been lobbying his fellow committee members to make the report public, but "the coalition of Conservatives and Socialists has simply been too strong". 

The EU's anti-fraud office OLAF is currently studying the report, and said it was "too early" to predict whether legal actions would be taken, according to a spokesman. OLAF had already demanded in September 2007 that MEPs should detail staff wages bills and expenses claims.