Henrik Hololei, a gregarious Estonian who had reached the heights of director-general in the EU’s civil service, had been caught accepting freebies from the government of Qatar while his department was negotiating a lucrative aviation deal ― with, ever so coincidentally, Qatar.
It was fine, the European Commission said when the matter came to light in 2023: All his free flights had been signed off by a senior person in the department. Trouble was, the senior person in the department was Hololei.
It caused a bit of stink in Brussels at the time, but chances are that in Europe at large, few people ever heard of it.
And that ― as well as the Commission’s muted response, the remarkable conclusion that no EU rules were broken, the fact that after stepping down Hololei simply made a lateral move to a cushy senior adviser role, and the widespread nothing-to-see-here attitude of the Brussels chatterati ― is the perfect illustration of the creeping sense of impunity infecting the system.
Brussels lifers are used to the periodic splashes of scandals and “-gates,” which just this past month included a ruling on whether text messages should be scrutinized as official documents, and reports of fraudulent promotions of a “friendly circle” at an EU agency.
The EU has a problem, and it’s not clear anyone wants to do anything about it.
To draw up a list of the bloc’s problems with corruption (both large and small, and in the broadest sense of the word) is to detail a horror show of bad practice: the revolving doors between industry and the EU, nepotism in the bloc’s most powerful institutions, harassment at work, downright fraud.
Did the US learn the revolving door from the EU? Or vice a versa?
The thing is, the EU has plenty of oversight bodies that are supposed to sort out this kind of stuff ― the ombudsman, the public prosecutor, the parliamentary committees, even an entire court system. But when they call out bad, or even illegal behavior (which they do), it often seems not to make a blind bit of difference.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The EU’s General Court ruled that the Commission had been wrong to withhold from the public text messages exchanged between von der Leyen and the CEO of the drug giant Pfizer, Albert Bourla, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic — and just before the company bagged the largest EU procurement contract of all time.
The full details of the vaccine contract remain secret, despite protests from MEPs who (successfully) took the Commission to court in a separate transparency case — which the executive is challenging.
But will we ever see the texts? Almost certainly not.
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