The European Parliament panel that is charged with responding to the Qatargate bribery scandal is divided over whether the real threat comes from without — or within.
This split was laid bare Thursday as lawmakers, rushing to show they’re taking the scandal seriously ahead of next year’s European elections, held a debate on a report regarding the Parliament’s response to allegations of a cash-for-favors scheme involving current and former EU parliamentarians, on behalf of interests from Qatar, Morocco and Mauritania.
The scandal, which has come to be known as Qatargate, was just one clear example of the need to shore up the Parliament’s “security culture,” said Slovak MEP Vladimír Bilčík, one of the file’s principal authors and a member of the center-right European People’s Party.
He and French MEP Nathalie Loiseau, of the centrist Renew group, drafted a measure that sought to protect the democratically elected institution from potentially nefarious non-EU influence, while offering additional transparency. Their proposals include stricter requirements for interest groups to enter details in the EU’s lobbyist database, heightened IT security and limits on to what extent MEPs can speak out as representatives of the Parliament on official trips.
Yet changes currently on the table don’t go far enough to hold the elected parliamentarians themselves accountable, argue EU lawmakers from left-leaning parties.
The Qatargate parliamentarians were subject to few checks. Pier Antonio Panzeri, accused of orchestrating the cash-for-influence scheme, was able to lobby his colleagues based on his privileges as a former MEP. That’s beyond his nongovernmental organization, Fight Impunity, remaining unlisted in the lobbyist database that’s known as the transparency register, as would be required.
The biggest fights might well involve parliamentarians’ own pocketbooks, predicted Andreas Schieder, the Austrian MEP who serves as the S&D’s point person on the file (or shadow rapporteur). He believes the Parliament should be “very strict” when it comes to the cooling-off period between when MEPs leave office and can start lobbying former colleagues. While the Parliament’s rule-making Bureau quickly put in place a six-month break, Schieder said this cooling-off period should be more in line with international standards of a year or two.
“We have also to find strict regulations to limit side jobs as much as possible,” Schieder said in an interview on Wednesday.
Critics say the committee’s emphasis on external threats such as foreign countries seeking influence — rather than internal ethics loopholes — was baked-in by political choices early on.
As MEPs returned from the winter break shaken by arrests and probes, they opted for a path-of-least-resistance response. Rather than create a whole new inquiry panel to deal with the fallout — thus trying to prevent a repeat — they opted to repurpose an existing committee tasked with rooting out foreign interference in EU democracies by the likes of China and Russia.
Although this solution was faster than building a committee from scratch, it lacked the power to conduct any internal investigations.
The name of the panel reflected its ballooning purpose: “Special committee on foreign interference in all democratic processes in the European Union, including disinformation, and the strengthening of integrity, transparency and accountability in the European Parliament.”
Yet despite its grand name, critics say the mindset of the committee — known in EU parliament jargon as ING2 — never really expanded beyond its preset target of external actors.
The issue of basic corruption is “not about a battle between authoritarianism and democracy, or that the invasion of Ukraine or espionage. It’s not even particularly about foreign interference,” said Irish MEP Clare Daly, the shadow rapporteur for The Left group. Rather, she added, the response needs to be about “accountability in this institution.” She argued that the new report largely duplicated efforts from the committee’s previous work.
Open government campaigners are disappointed that the measure takes no steps to beef up enforcement of the Parliament’s existing rules. While President Roberta Metsola’s 14-point ethics overhaul was meant as fast fixes, the Parliament’s investigative committee was intended to frame broader institutional reforms.
Those included harsher punishments for MEPs who break the rules, said Transparency International EU’s Nick Aiossa, who called the proposal a “misguided endeavor.”
But Loiseau, the co-rapporteur, had little patience for suggestions that the report didn’t go far enough.
“Up to now, we didn’t have enough transparency or security where it was needed. And therefore we’re going to try to reinforce both,” she said in an interview Wednesday.
Eddy Wax contributed reporting.