One of the fascinating things about the EU’s various governing bodies is the way that they manage to combine corruption and cant in roughly equal measures. Nowhere is this more true than in the relentlessly moralizing EU ‘parliament’. To take one example, the way in which many MEPs manipulate their expenses has long been an open secret. Now someone’s talking:
“A senior member of the European parliament yesterday exposed what he claimed was widespread corruption at the Strasbourg assembly by revealing that nearly 200 of his fellow Euro MPs had faked attendance at parliamentary sessions in order to pick up generous daily allowances. Hans-Peter Martin, an Austrian Social Democrat MEP, said he had seen scores of colleagues signing on for parliamentary sessions which they had missed, to claim a daily attendance allowance of €262 (£175).”
They’ll get away with it, doubtless.