EU Secretary General and President not interested in fraud

international | eu | news report Friday June 06, 2008 07:38 by Bart Nijs - European Court of Auditors

How the European Court of Auditors is treating a mismanagement complaint

Five years ago, an EU Court of Auditors official informed his Secretary General of his suspicions of fraud and blackmail being practiced at the institution. After meeting with a refusal to examine the case, one yeare ago, he urged the Court´s President to react to the Secretary General´s failure to act. The only reaction he received was a disciplinary procedure being launched against him.

In a request that the Secretary General of the European Court of Auditors, Michel Hervé, should have received from me on August, 4th, 2003 (which he did not, but that is another, equally fraud-ridden story), I drew his attention to the fact that some of my colleagues, translators in the institution like me, had been blackmailed into accepting an invalidity pension. Their work in the institution had been made increasingly difficult over the years, and at least one of them had been threatened with a disciplinary procedure if she did not accept to become “invalid”. Apart from being intimidation, this also resulted in fraud to the detriment of the Community invalidity scheme. In November 2003, I sent additional information to Mr Hervé.

I mentioned these irregularities, among other indications of mismanagement, to justify my request, the subject of which I cannot go into here. However, the answer I received from Mr Hervé on December 1st, 2003, proved something I had not expected to learn, i.e. that the Secretary General of the EU Court of Auditors refuses to investigate into fraud.

According to Article 248 of the EC Treaty, it is the Court of Auditors´ task to check if the European taxpayer´s money is spent correctly and if the accounts reflecting these transactions are reliable. OLAF, the anti-fraud office to which the Court forwards fraud cases it detects during its audits, is in the first place responsible for combating fraud. The Court of Auditors is not really supposed to engage in fraudulent activities itself.

Nor is it expected to brush aside any suggestion of this having happened. Applying Articles 22, 22a and 22b of the EU Staff Regulations to the Court of Auditors, whenever informed about mere fraud suspicions in his institution, the Secretary General has to report them to OLAF. My above-mentioned request was accompanied by two affidavits in which harassment victims declared invalid confirmed what had happened. Mr Hervé did not express any concern. Worse, he answered he could not be bothered, and did not even think of commenting on the fraud and blackmail. He did so using the following words:

« Je n´entends aucunement entrer dans l´analyse ou le commentaire des hypothèses et constructions que vous établissez dans les lettres auxquelles il est répondu par la présente, examen qui ne pourrait en rien être pertinent pour l´établissement de la présente réponse ».

(“I have no intention whatsoever to go into analysing, or commenting on, the assumptions and constructs in your letters, as this would be totally irrelevant for composing this answer.”)

He confirmed this seven months later, on 30 June 2004, referring explicitly to the passage quoted above:

« Je confirme que ces éléments ne sont pas pertinents dans le cadre du présent dossier. Je citerai à titre de simple exemple l´accusation de chantage proférée à l´égard de certains collègues. »

(“I confirm that these elements, e.g. the blackmail you accuse certain colleagues of, are not relevant in the context of this file”)

On June 30th, 2004, the Staff Regulations obliging him to report the case to OLAF were already in force. Four years later, and five years after my first request, Hervé has not started considering that, being accompanied by the victims´ affidavits, my allegations might be more than just “constructs and assumptions”. But even if they had been just that, he had to notify my “assumptions” to OLAF in 2004.

He did not. And neither did Mr Hubert Weber, the then President of the EU Court of Auditors, when, in a long letter I sent to him in August 2007, I reminded him of his Secretary General´s failure to act . Instead, a disciplinary procedure was launched against me almost four months later (why this hesitation?) for having ventured, among other things, to accuse Mr Hervé. Ten months later, the disciplinary procedure is still in a very, very early stage. It has not even been submitted to the disciplinary council. To the best of my knowledge, the necessity of creating a council charged with treating my case has not even been decided on yet.

After five years of such treatment of an obvious fraud case, the European taxpayer, whose interests the Court of Auditors claims to protect, should know what is being done with his money.