EU rocked by graft scandal

EU LAWMAKERS were to converge on the bloc’s parliament yesterday rocked by a new cash-for-influence probe in their midst, aimed at loggerheads over efforts to bolster ethical safeguards at the heart of Europe.

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The plenary session in Strasbourg, France, comes just weeks after officers were sealed and five people charged in Belgium.

Daniel Freund, a transparency campaigner turned lawmaker for Europe’s Greens, said first he thought hearing of the arrests was “Oh, not again!”

“The European Parliament has been tarnished by a string of scandals over the years, with lawmakers still smarting from the biggest in decades, the 2022 Qatar-gate, which is weighing through the Belgian courts.

“I fear that we still haven’t done enough,” Freund said, to “send a very clear signal that this place is free of corruption, and that if you are corrupt, you’re going to get found out, and you’re going to get very severely punished”.

The murky picture is all the more harmful as the EU seeks to challenge democratic backsliding from Türkiye to Hungary and assert itself as a bulwark against the might-is-right worldview of US president Donald Trump.

In a statement, the bloc’s ethics watchdog said the succession of scandals “damage public trust in the EU”.