Word: parliament
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...scandal has been exacerbated by parliamentary leaders' clumsy attempts to cover up the report. Even within the Parliament, only a handful of MEPs on the budgetary control committee were able to see the report - and they were obliged to read it in a guarded room, on condition that they took no notes and signed a pledge saying they would keep its contents secret. Although the Parliament's vice presidents agreed on Monday to review the system of hiring office assistants, they spent two weeks insisting the report was either non-existent or confidential...
...page report was only made public when maverick Dutch Green Party MEP Paul van Buitenen broke the rules to put a summary on his website. Van Buitenen, whose whistle-blowing in 1999 helped bring down the entire European Commission, says the Parliament's top brass knew about the fraud for years but decided not to take any action to tighten the rules. "But so far, the Parliament has not been prepared to come forward with concrete proposals to improve the current system," he says. "The Parliament cannot claim to be the conscience of Europe while this is happening...
...anti-fraud unit, OLAF, has already launched an investigation into the allegations. But since the Parliament's own guidelines on hiring staff are vague, and do not even require receipts for expense claims, MEPs can claim they have not broken any rules...
...British Liberal Democrat MEP Chris Davies, who read the report under guard, said the actions of some of his colleagues had disgraced the Parliament. "Make no mistake, we are talking about very large sums of money," he says...
...Davies wants offenders named and shamed, and the worst ones to be thrown in jail. But he says the Parliament shot itself in the foot by trying to keep the report secret. "It was utterly pathetic, naïve and hypocritical. You wonder what planet they grew up on," he says. "The European Parliament is doing good work. But in terms of recognition and acceptance by the wide European public, these incidents can only harm it. And that's a shame...