Corruption, cover-ups and the Committee of the Regions

As unelected regional assemblies grow sucking up more powers from local authorities and emergency services are 'rationalised' to conform to EU regional boundaries the EU's Committee of the Regions grows in size and importance.
When we fought, and won, the elected regional assembly debate in the North East the opposition dismissed any EU connection as being part of the scaremongering tactics by swivel-eyed eurosceptics.
Continue to ignore the elephant in the room and eventually we will be up to our necks in dung. The smell is currently becoming unbearable but not everybody has worked out where it is coming from!

Brussels Sprouts,
Private Eye,
3rd March

In the spirit of cosiness, back-scratching and the sweeping of dirt under taxpayer-funded carpets, the European parliament's budgetary control committee has decided NOT to penalise comrades in the Committee of the Regions (CoR) for past sins.

Instead, the committee has ignored its own dissenting members, led by the Swedish MEP Nils Lundgren, and will not now postpone approval of the CoR's 2004 accounts.
Lundgren, the budgetary committee's vice-chairman, had wanted various questions investigated.
These concerned auditing of the vast amounts spent to restore the CoR's lavish building, and an unusual savings scheme that effectively allowed CoR staff to add to their salaries.

This is not the first time poor Lundgren has been thwarted. He was previously disappointed when trying to get a fair conclusion to a parliamentary resolution over the persecution of the CoR's former internal auditor, Robert McCoy (see Eyes passim), who made the mistake of exposing fraud involving bogus travel claims and has hardly worked since.
In 2004 the European Parliament had called for formal apologies to be made to McCoy. But the apologies have been refused as "inappropriate". Two years on, McCoy remains at home "ill".

The budgetary control committee's latest decision on the CoR makes parliament look as self-serving and feeble as ever. Meanwhile the CoR goes from strength to strength; it now has a bigger budget (£40m up from £17.5m before 2004) and, at 400, nearly double the staff. Business as usual then.