Bill Newton Dunn MEP: MEPs' assistants (March 13, 2008)
There has, rightly, been an outcry against the confidential auditors' report about dubious assistants employed by some MEPs. Being a member of the parliament's Budgetary Control committee, I read the full report - in a sealed room and had to sign that I would not reveal its contents nor take any notes. The report by a team of auditors said that they had looked at a sample of the contracts between some MEPs and the assistants whom they employed. No names, no political parties, no nationalities were identified. It was clear to me that some - but not all - un-named MEPs have stretched the rules beyond breaking-point. The problem, in my opinion, is that the parliament's staff is grossly overstretched : they have to try to verify contracts in any of three alphabets (ours, Greek, or Bulgarian cyrillic) and in any of the 23 official EU languages, and there are not enough of them to do the job effectively. When the full committee met, the Liberal MEPs moved that the report be made public. The committee chairman, an Austrian socialist, insisted that a vote was not on the agenda so it would have to be part of Any Other Business just before the meeting's end on the following afternoon. When we reached that moment, a lawyer was given the floor and he argued why a vote was not possible (not least because the report did not belong to the committee and was therefore not ours to publish). The clock ticked rapidly towards 18.30 when the language interpreters are entitled to go home. As the wrangling continued, suddenly the committee room filled with arriving Christian-Democrat and Socialist MEPs to fill the empty places. At 18.29 the vote was called - and we Liberals lost it. I love the work of the parliament, but at that moment I felt ashamed at the blatant cover-up by the Conservatives' allies and by Labour's allies.
Being a member of the parliament's Budgetary Control committee, I read the full report - in a sealed room and had to sign that I would not reveal its contents nor take any notes. The report by a team of auditors said that they had looked at a sample of the contracts between some MEPs and the assistants whom they employed. No names, no political parties, no nationalities were identified. It was clear to me that some - but not all - un-named MEPs have stretched the rules beyond breaking-point. The problem, in my opinion, is that the parliament's staff is grossly overstretched : they have to try to verify contracts in any of three alphabets (ours, Greek, or Bulgarian cyrillic) and in any of the 23 official EU languages, and there are not enough of them to do the job effectively.
When the full committee met, the Liberal MEPs moved that the report be made public. The committee chairman, an Austrian socialist, insisted that a vote was not on the agenda so it would have to be part of Any Other Business just before the meeting's end on the following afternoon. When we reached that moment, a lawyer was given the floor and he argued why a vote was not possible (not least because the report did not belong to the committee and was therefore not ours to publish). The clock ticked rapidly towards 18.30 when the language interpreters are entitled to go home. As the wrangling continued, suddenly the committee room filled with arriving Christian-Democrat and Socialist MEPs to fill the empty places. At 18.29 the vote was called - and we Liberals lost it.
I love the work of the parliament, but at that moment I felt ashamed at the blatant cover-up by the Conservatives' allies and by Labour's allies.
