Fraud, Nepotism, Corruption, Impunity are the EU's Foundations
Die Welt and Politico on the structural features of the EU--you'd be amazed how deep, entrenched, and cancerous the rot at the heart of the European Union is
Prelim:
This text first appeared in Die Welt’s partner publication Politico. The [Welt’s] version was shortened and edited during translation.
And now I’ll present you with my translation of Politico’s original piece, entitled, ‘How the EU always gets away with it: From fraud to nepotism to revolving doors between the public sector and industry, the stench of impunity is pervasive’.
Apart from the way weaker title chosen by Die Welt, I’ll highlight that which was edited, shortened, or otherwise changed.
Oh, lest I forget, emphases and [snark] mine.
A Sense of Impunity Has Been Evolving in the EU
By Mari Eccles, Die Welt, 2 June 2025 [source; archived]
One scandal follows another in the EU. Although some reach right to the top, such as von der Leyen’s ‘Pfizergate’, almost nobody in Europe notices—Brussels usually just goes back to business as usual. This is due to the interests of national governments
In the chic conference rooms and cafés of Brussels’ EU quarter, the outrage was great: why had poor Henrik been singled out of all people? Henrik Hololei, a gregarious Estonian who had made it to Director General in the EU, had been caught accepting favours, including free flights, from the Qatari government when his department was negotiating a lucrative aviation deal—quite incidentally with Qatar.
When the matter came to light in 2023, the EU Commission declared that everything was in order and that all free flights had been authorised by a high-ranking employee of the department. The only problem was that this high-ranking employee was Hololei himself. This caused quite a stir in Brussels at the time, but probably few people in Europe as a whole realised anything about it.
The Commission’s muted response, the remarkable conclusion that no EU rules had been broken, the fact that Hololei took a job as a senior adviser after his resignation, and the widespread attitude among professional Brussels watchers that there was nothing to see here—this is a perfect example of the sense of impunity that has crept into the system.
[at this point, the Politico piece adds quite some more meat to that bone:
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.
Needless to say, these ‘other’, of course, singular occurrences, are left out of Die Welt’s piece: gee, I wonder why…]
The EU is ‘politically more like the Vatican and the United Nations’, says Denis MacShane, a former British Minister for Europe who has experienced the EU close up [as a ‘British Minister’, Mr. MacShane quite certainly knows a thing or two about incompetence, buffoonery, and corruption]. Both institutions ‘have been rocked by allegations of sloppiness and corruption in recent years’. The list of problems is long: close links between industry and the EU, cronyism in powerful EU institutions, workplace bullying, fraud [it’s about to get way worse].
The paradox is that the EU has numerous control bodies that are supposed to regulate such things—the ombudsman, the public prosecutor’s office, parliamentary committees, even an entire judicial system. But when they denounce bad or even illegal behaviour (which they do), often nothing happens [that is because this isn’t paradoxical: these ‘numerous control bodies’ are staffed by appointees from the very same people who do these shitty, corrupt things (who all bring their retainers—camp followers—along)].
That would be bad enough in itself, but it reinforces a mood of doom that plays into the hands of nationalist politicians. From Budapest to Paris, Brussels’ failures and the lack of consequences provide fertile ground for anti-European rhetoric [this is compounded by the fact that most journos™ are beholden to the same ideological and value-judgemental blinders as those who they cover (who, in turn, rely on the very same journos™ to learn about the world: talk about cyclical argumentation, or the functional equivalent of Plato’s Cave].
The ethical carelessness and political irresponsibility of the EU institutions has created a culture of impunity that not only undermines the trust of EU citizens in democratic institutions, but can also be misused as a weapon by EU opponents inside and outside the Union.
Thus Alberto Alemanno, Professor of EU Law at the elite Parisian university HEC and founder of the non-governmental organisation Good Lobby [incidentally, funded by, among others, the EU Parliament, UNICEF, the Open Society Foundations, Transparency Int’l, the WWF, the Adessium Foundation (check out their Annual Report 2024 and go to pp. 21-23 where they explain that their funding for ‘local investigative journalism’ went to Correctiv—yep, the same guys who, while a sting op by the domestic intel org and paid by the German gov’t, faked the reporting™ on what I called ‘Stupid Watergate’, etc.].
The existence of a national government is ultimately decided at the ballot box, which is why corruption and a lack of accountability often fall back on them. The world of the EU, on the other hand, is less transparent. Only recently, the EU has been rocked (or rather, not rocked at all) by two scandals, either of which could have toppled a government at national level.
The first case concerns the woman at the top who is responsible for ensuring compliance with the EU treaties: the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled [Politico links to this piece, Die Welt doesn’t] that the Commission had wrongly withheld text messages between von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla from the public. They had been exchanged at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Shortly before Pfizer was awarded the largest EU contract of all time.
The details of the vaccine contract remain secret, despite protests from MEPs who (successfully) took the Commission to court [Politico links to this piece, Die Welt doesn’t] in a separate transparency case—which the executive is now challenging. Will we ever get to see the details? Almost certainly not.
‘I'm not saying that the fish stinks from the head, but it’s a widespread culture of trying to prevent transparency’, says Herwig Hofmann, Professor of European Public Law at the University of Luxembourg.
The Case Was Simply Shelved
The ruling on the text message exchange known as ‘Pfizergate’ came at around the same time as the EU anti-fraud agency OLAF uncovered [Politico links to this piece, Die Welt doesn’t] that the European Asylum Agency had restructured entire departments so that senior staff could place friends in management positions. There were no consequences—the case was shelved without disciplinary action.
[Politico ‘splains’ this as follows (which is omitted from Die Welt’s piece:
The EU operates within ‘limits’ of administrative, political and judicial accountability, said Hofmann. ‘There are, of course, specific difficulties when it comes to the EU because of the great complexity and the amount of different bodies and agencies and actors we have nowadays.’
[if something is overly complex—which, by the way, means differentiations in structure and the amount of moving parts in any given system—it will create its own idiosyncrasies over time, which can and has been observed in the EU (or Washington, D.C., for that matter]
One of the biggest scandals in the recent past was the fast-track appointment [Politico links to this piece, Die Welt doesn’t] of Martin Selmayr, the head of cabinet of then Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, as Secretary-General in 2018. The then 47-year-old was dubbed the ‘Monster of Berlaymont’ due to his intimidating and hierarchical manner, in reference to the building in which the EU Commission is based.
[the above picture is from Politico’s piece; and if you’re musing, well, didn’t I read about Mr. Selmayr’s shenanigans recently in these pages—that’s because you did]
Selmayr was one of Juncker’s closest confidants and the architect of his rise. Selmayr’s appointment as Secretary-General was put on the Commission's agenda at the last minute to prevent opposition from forming. Some of the numerous critics at the time spoke of a ‘coup’ [this is Die Welt’s link, and for once Politico’s piece didn’t provide a link to a source].
Emily O'Reilly, the EU Ombudswoman at the time, found four cases of misconduct, including an astonishing trick: the Commission [led by Mr. Juncker] had organised a selection procedure for a new Deputy Secretary-General just to ensure that Selmayr was formally eligible for the post of Secretary-General in the first place [reeks a bit of putting Dick Cheney in charge of finding™ a suitable VP candidate for George W. Bush].
But things are not much better in the European Parliament, the only directly elected EU institution (which is therefore theoretically the most accountable). Its President, Roberta Metsola, often speaks of her pride at being only the third woman to head the institution. She promised to ‘make it easier’ for the women after her. So far, however, she only seems to have made it easier for her brother-in-law, whom she appointed as her Chief of Staff [Politico links to this piece, Die Welt doesn’t] last year.
[here Die Welt excludes the following from Politico’s reporting:
(The announcement was postponed for a few months because the ‘Qatargate’ cash-for-influence scandal — not to be confused with the ‘Huaweigate’ cash-for-influence scandal or the aforementioned ‘Pfizergate’ text message transparency scandal—hit the Parliament at around the same time. ‘I am not sure adding the sobriquet “-gate” to any story of bad behavior in the EP or Commission is helpful’, MacShane said.)
And now back to Die Welt’s piece.]
The ECJ Overturned the Penalty
In another area, the fight against harassment within the EU, Metsola’s hard line is certainly supported [sure, perhaps because that’s an optimal area for virtue-signalling that doesn’t really bother the powers-that-be] However, some feel that the sanctions against MEPs for misbehaviour - cutting their daily allowances instead of their salaries - are somewhat half-hearted.
‘It's not a deterrent, because as we saw in the last legislature, one MEP who was penalised by Metsola for bullying her assistant did it again later,’ says Nick Aiossa, director of Transparency International EU. ‘And this is a rare case where sanctions have been imposed at all.’
At least almost: the ECJ overturned [Politico links to this piece, Die Welt doesn’t] the decision this year due to the way in which the case was investigated [i.e., the ‘prosecution’ f***** up]. The accused MEP, Monica Semedo, has always vehemently denied any wrongdoing.
All this sounds like quite a lot of people are getting away with quite a lot of problematic things. One reason could be the structure of the EU. For one thing, there is the sheer complexity of the system. ‘The EU is particularly unaccountable’, says a parliamentary staff member interviewed for this article. In part, it is the labyrinthine system that makes it ‘very opaque’.
In addition, power still lies with the national governments. It is convenient for them to have scapegoats in Brussels. It is also too complicated to intervene [not only that, but I’d argue it’s also because it would be highly embarrassing]. There is therefore a strong impetus to maintain the status quo.
‘It is primarily national politicians—and not EU politicians—who decide whether, to what extent, and when EU issues enter the national political debate, without being subject to corresponding public scrutiny or accountability,’ says HEC Professor Alemanno [did the good Professor of EU Law forget about ‘transposition’? Incidentally, neither Die Welt nor Politico mentions this].
This may be a ‘reassuring’ instrument for national governments, but it comes at a high cost. These costs also include the fact that the EU ends up being more vulnerable than it should be.
[at this point, Die Welt’s editors cut the substantial following paragraphs from Politico’s piece:
And there’s a further complication, which national politics doesn’t suffer from when it comes to investigating impropriety. Some conflate criticism of the institutions, or of the conduct of individuals, with an attack on the concept of the EU itself.
Ex-Ombudsman O’Reilly, who criticized what she described as a culture of ‘powerful consiglieri’—a word for trusted confidants that was originally applied to advisers to Mafia bosses—at the top of the Commission, also felt compelled to explain that she wasn’t attacking the very concept of the EU when she came after its officials for their conduct [of course, because doing so would also implicate her].
‘I know I seem very critical, but I come at it as someone with immense gratitude toward the EU’, she said.
‘I would not have had the career that I’ve had as an Irish woman without our joining the EU and with[out] the EU dragging my government kicking and screaming into the 20th century in relation to women and labor laws. So I see it as a potentially amazing moral force.’
‘So when I see it acting in particular ways…that concerns me. And that’s where I come from, not from a wish to be critical for the sake of it’, she told Politico last year.
It has led to a certain paranoia: In the aftermath of Politico’s reporting on Hololei’s flights, one reader working in the Brussels bubble said earnestly that some in the Commission thought Russia was behind the story. To eliminate any doubt, it wasn’t. (Nor this one, by the way.)
[And now back to Die Welt’s piece once more.]
The EU supervisory authorities are not idle; they are putting pressure on von der Leyen [on top of this paragraph, Politico had a sub-header reading ‘Something with no teeth’, which Die Welt also omitted]. When she took office as head of the EU executive in 2019, she promised to make transparency a centrepiece of her term of office. However, she has been repeatedly criticised for not keeping her promises, such as the establishment of a new ethics authority with powers to impose sanctions.
[another paragraph from Politico’s piece that didn’t make it into Die Welt’s article:
But she has repeatedly come under fire for backsliding on commitments, like the promise to set up a new ethics body with enforcement powers. O’Reilly wasn’t too optimistic, saying she expected ‘something with no teeth, something that will possibly sit there passively, wait for complaints to come in’.
[Back to Die Welt.]
In fact, in the first Commission meeting of her second term, which began on 1 December [2024], von der Leyen adopted a regulation that will make access to documents even more difficult—another decision that is being challenged before the ECJ by the non-governmental organisation ClientEarth [here’s their ‘About’ section; the latest info on their funders is from 2022, and they incl.
Our top funders in 2022 were the Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), Bloomberg Philanthropies, Postcode Earth Trust, Sequoia Climate Foundation, The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad)—Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI), AKO Foundation, The Tilia Fund, European Climate Foundation (ECF), Arcadia, Grantham Foundation & Trust and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) - Forest Governance, Markets and Climate Programme (FGMC).
While I personally agree with their aims to fight on behalf of Earth, I’m very much wary of these ties…]
The judges have the power to impose heavy fines on companies, countries and even the EU itself for breaches of the European treaties or to cancel them. However, they are far more reserved when it comes to individuals.
For example, a diplomat from one EU country said of the ‘Pfizergate’ scandal that despite the court ruling against the Commission that news should be treated like any other document, he expected ‘no impact on them or their approach’. Even in terms of transparency, the decision could only lead to those who have been denied access to documents receiving ‘slightly more detailed’ explanations, the diplomat added.
And so everything continues as usual.
[The following detailed section was cut from Die Welt’s piece:
‘Throw the scoundrels out’
For decades, capitals and the Brussels core have been involved in a push-and-pull over where power resides and how much the EU centrally, rather than its national governments, should be democratically accountable. While there are arguments for both, a lack of accountability at the European level doesn’t help make officials feel they are answerable to a restless electorate.
‘Even the basic premise of representative democracy, that on election day voters can “throw the scoundrels out”, that is to replace the government, does not work in the EU’, said Alemanno, the EU law professor [that would be au contraire to the set-up of the bloc: as explained accurately above, it’s nat’l gov’ts that determine policy (in the so-called ‘EU Council’), which is then implemented by the EU Commission—having accountability at the EU level is anathema to those nat’l gov’ts whose interest in the EU is to bypass accountability by outsourcing the policy prescriptions to Brussels].
‘Citizens are deprived not only of influence at the EU level, but also of any knowledge and understanding of EU politics that would allow for popular scrutiny and effective democratic control.’ [some—like myself—would call that ‘by design’ or ‘intentional’; note also that the way the EU is taught in schools and at universities is typically based on value-judgements, such as ‘it’s better than going to war against each other as in WW1 and WW2’ rather than focussing on, say, transposition, the way the EU Council-cum-Commission cabal rules, etc.]
Some believe that lack of understanding comes from weak media coverage of EU politics [that’s part of the issue, yet the non-teaching of how the EU works is way worse in my opinion; another issue is the failing upwards/no consequences stuff].
‘It tends to be opinion columns rather than legwork reporting’, said MacShane, the former Europe minister, who served a prison sentence in the U.K. for filing bogus expense claims. ‘Most Brussels reporting I see in U.K. or European papers is the traditional singleton foreign correspondent type reporting.’ [which simply doesn’t work out as that dude is often invited to evenin’ galas, afterwork cocktail bar meetings with fellow journos™ and/or EU staffers, and the like—and if you rock that boat, you’re ostracised in a foreign city…]
Despite that, he argues, Brussels isn’t so uniquely bad. ‘Over the years I have seen far more impunity in national governments, even local governments, than there was in Brussels.’
It’s a low bar, but it is a bar.
MEPs, however, aren’t doing the ‘necessary work’ of holding the Commission to account [here’s, e.g., Austrian EU MP Helmut Brandstätter who wasn’t present during some 40% of votes in the EU Parliament], he said. ‘All Eurocrats from commissioners downwards are appointed on a party political basis, so the party groups defend their own.’ [That last sentence is an apt summary of what ails these institutions: if you aren’t a party apparatchik in the first place—by which is meant you understood the unwritten rules of the game (of not rocking that boat)—you aren’t placed on an elect-able spot of the candidates’ list. One of the chief problems bedevilling European politics is—party politicking.]
Aiossa, from Transparency International [sic], also singled out the Parliament as more problematic than the Commission.
‘This culture that has been able to fester over the years…has allowed for a series of scandals, Qatargate, Russiagate, Huawei, without any kind of meaningful reforms to address the next scandal’, he said [that’s because MEPs police™ themselves].
He added that some ‘basic rules’ need to be reformed, including a ban on MEPs having any side activities with organizations that lobby the EU [oh, you mean, e.g., the EU Commission paying a ‘mass line’ of ‘Green’ activists to create the illusion of groundswell support for their policies?].
‘It’s a simple ask, but very controversial among MEPs, who have very lucrative side jobs with many companies and industries that are trying to influence EU policy making’, Aiossa said.
If a smaller second chamber were to be created in the Parliament consisting of national lawmakers—similar to the Ständerat in Switzerland—it might be ‘better placed to have oversight of full accountability,’ MacShane said [sure, but let’s not let the compromised EU Judiciary™ off the hook here, which is notably missing from Transparency Int’l’s demands].
But before things get better, they may get worse.
Depending on whom you ask, a clampdown on NGO funding by the Commission is either a right-wing attack on the EU’s climate and health agendas, or a legitimate attempt to make their financing more transparent [all binary issues are, at best, attempts to deflect attention from what’s going on].
There’s no doubt that Brussels NGOs are one of the few groups that try to hold the EU institutions to account, something they might find harder to do now the Commission is blocking cash for lobbying the EU.
‘The current persecution of NGOs is only going to aggravate this situation’, the Parliament official said. ‘And the ones behind it know that very well.’
[And now back to Die Welt’s piece.]
For example in the Hololei case. The French newspaper Libération reported [Politico links to this piece, Die Welt doesn’t] that the European anti-fraud agency OLAF had discovered that he had passed on confidential information about the major aviation agreement with Qatar. In return, he and his confidants received gifts, including stays in a five-star hotel in Doha [if true, this is a pretty cheap price; the payoff typically comes after a politico’s™ career in politics comes to a close].
Last month, the Commission finally opened an investigation after the EU Public Prosecutor's Office launched criminal proceedings [Politico links to this piece, Die Welt doesn’t] against Hololei in 2024. He did not respond to a request from Politico to comment on the matter. Will the proceedings have an impact on the aviation agreement with Qatar [that one leads to a story™ about Mr. Trump accepting an air plane from Qatar (as no EU-themed corruption piece can do without side-eyes towards Mr. Trump, it would appear)], which he was involved in negotiating? Of course not—and that jab at Mr. Trump is conspicuously absent from Politico’s reporting].
Bottom Lines
Apart from serving as an abject lesson in the piss-poor standards, if any, there are left in legacy media reporting™, we learned two main issues:
First, the EU Commission and the European Council (that is, the assembled ministers of the members-states’ gov’ts) are setting the agenda removed from any electoral/parliamentary oversight. Funnily enough, Wikipedia spills the beans on just how removed these powerbrokers-that-be are from responsibility:
The European Parliament (EP) is one of the two legislative bodies of the European Union and one of its seven institutions. Together with the Council of the European Union (known as the Council and informally as the Council of Ministers), it adopts European legislation, following a proposal by the European Commission.
Get this: the Council sets the policy in cahoots with the Commission, which is then ‘adopted’ by the EU Parliament, which itself, as Wikipedia ‘splains’,
has legislative power in that the adoption of EU legislation normally requires its approval, and that of the Council, in what amounts to a bicameral legislature. However, it does not formally possess the right of initiative (i.e. the right to formally initiate the legislative procedure) in the way that most national parliaments of the member states do, as the right of initiative is a prerogative of the European Commission.[9][10] Nonetheless, the Parliament and the Council each have the right to request the Commission to initiate the legislative procedure and put forward a proposal.[11]
So, to make EU law™, the Council cobbles together a wish-list, which it hands over to the Commission whose bureaucrats—under the overall direction of Martin Selmayr—then writes what in EU legalese is ‘secondary law’ = ‘regulations, directives, decisions, recommendations and opinions’, which technically is the functional equivalent of an executive order (in US parlance)—that both the EU and member-states’ parliaments then must promulgate.
In other words: the legislative process is upside-down by design; there’s no fault in the day-to-day operations of the EU: it’s working as designed and intended, locking out the electorates and judiciary at both the EU and member-states’ levels.
The EU is certainly a lot of things, but it ain’t a representative democracy.
Second, the conscious use of Mob lingo—in the above piece, the term consiglieri is used—to which I’m suggesting the addition of omertà, indicates a quite close correlation between how the EU and the Mafia are run. I submit that since the latter kinda tries to keep women and children out of harm’s way (just consider the push of EU institutions to get pregnant and other women, as well as children ‘vaccinated against Covid-19’); the EU, by contrast, has apparently less morality than the Mob, to say nothing about its protagonists’ (lack of) conscience.
I would not have had the career that I’ve had…
That would be former EU Ombudswoman O’Reilly who quite openly told everyone as to why that powerful Mob culture persists at the heart of the EU.
Power corrupts, and it seems that virtually everybody who aspires to go to Brussels™ is either compromised already and/or up for sale. That applies to politicos™, experts™, Eurocrats™, and journos™, as well as to lobbyists and other influence-peddlers.
So, let’s close this long-ish piece with another quote by French political economist Frédéric Bastiat from his ‘Justice and fraternity’, in Journal des Économistes, 15 June 1848, p. 324.
When under the pretext of fraternity [solidarity™, in EU-speak], the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.
And that, dear readers, is how to understand the EU élites.
Please excuse me, I’ll go and throw up now.