EU Bribery Scandal

" I never noticed that under the bed before " 🤣

Whether people have made snide comments or guilt by association inferences, claiming that EU bribe-takers are probably secretly anti-EU is an utterly desperate comeback.

Even a Conservaphobe like yourself can appreciate that surely.

Blind loyalism to anything is always a dead end and always head in the sand.

Look at the head of European Movement International, a group dedicated to supporting the EU and gets funded by the EU.

He called out the EU for side stepping this issue and is worried that it will damage the Eu.

Screaming by jingo and accusing him of being a lundy is not defending the EU, is not siding with those who are Anti EU.

He is just pointing out the obvious.

If you read the article a little more closely, when it talks about "EU leaders" wanting to avoid the issue, it's talking about the EU Council - i.e. the national governments of the member states. And, despite the headline, the article actually points out that while some leaders want to distance themselves from the issue, others are demanding action.

The matter was investigated by the Belgian police because the EU doesn't have a police force, or any powers of arrest. The Parliament has removed Kaili as a Vice President, and suspended consideration of all business involving Qatar pending an enquiry. Which may not be much but, as pointed out, is rather more than, e.g., the UK parliament does with members accused of corrupt behaviour.

Surely your second paragraph is contradicted by your first?

Sometimes, sometimes not. And sometimes - most often, in fact - it's a combination of agencies, of which some are police agencies and some are not.

But I don't see that it matters greatly. Either national law enforcement agencies do investigate corruption in EU institutions or they do not. In this case, they clearly did. That makes sense — it is national laws that are being broken here; the EU doesn't have a criminal code.

There's still a legitimate question to be asked, I think, about whether the EU requires its own law enforcement agencies, or whether we are better off relying on national agencies, which are independent of the EU, to do it. But you can be absolutely confident that those currently denouncing the EU as irredeemably corrupt would immediately denounce it as authoritarian and oppressive if it sought to establish its own law enforcement agencies to address corruption.

Probably a few bags of roubles in a house or two in Ireland too.

A lot in fact. If a story broke that the Qataris had been bribing Nigel Farage in his capacity as an MEP, what inference would you draw from that? Wouldn't he be quite rightly seen as a troublemaker who was working against the interests of the EU?