UK Parliament / Open data

EU: Financial Management and Fraud (EUC Report)

My Lords, I understand that, but OLAF has a duty to report to the member states, and still no prosecution has followed. Is the noble Lord happy with the fact that no prosecutions have followed the Eurostat scam? I do not know whether he is, but I do not think that it is very good. There is no internal audit control, which is why OLAF could not work out how big the scam was or who had done it. It is completely hopeless. It is worth reminding the House, while I am on this subject, that in 1999 the whole Commission had to resign precisely because of what were euphemistically termed financial irregularities. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, when he asks when a financial irregularity becomes a fraud. The two are very close cousins. The whole sorry Eurostat episode, four years after the Commission resigned, shows that nothing has really changed since then, in spite of the so-called reforms—an inconvenient truth that was conveniently omitted from the report. I move on to more inconvenient truths which appear to have been capriciously overlooked. Amazingly, it was not until 2002 that the Commission felt it necessary to employ a qualified accountant as chief accounting officer. This was Marta Andreasen, who has already been mentioned by my noble friend Lord Pearson, who gave evidence to the committee. Mrs Andreasen has an impressive CV and was working as accountant for the OECD when she was appointed by the Commission as chief accounting officer. What she found appalled her: a spaghetti bolognese of untraceable payments and bank accounts with no proper controls or signatories. She asked for the implementation of a double-entry book-keeping system, a coherent, secure computer system and an independent treasury audit. Unsurprisingly, she refused to sign the 2001 accounts because she considered them unreliable. Her aim was always, as stated in a letter to the committee, "““to help resolve the fundamental failures of the EU budget management in an effort to achieve the welfare of the European Union as well as the protection of European citizens' interest””." Whatever our views on the EU, we could at least agree on that; but her reward was to be suspended by a fax from the then Mr Kinnock—the now noble Lord, Lord Kinnock—and removed from her post after only five months. Mrs Andreasen gave very convincing evidence to the committee on 11 July last year. It was, I suppose, not surprising but none the less deeply disappointing that when the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, appeared before the committee on 25 July he made incorrect and misleading statements about Mrs Andreasenand her evidence. In question 468, he stated thatMrs Andreasen had made no complaint about the way he had conducted the procedures relating to her and her position in the Commission. That is quite untrue; her appeal against dismissal currently before the courts is precisely because of unfair procedure—procedure led by the then Mr Kinnock. Mr Kinnock went on to charge at question 469 that Mrs Andreasen had not been employed by the OECD when she applied for the position of chief accounting officer; in other words, that she had falsified her CV. This defamatory statement is also untrue; Mrs Andreasen was an official at the OECD at that time, and was so certified by the OECD on 14 November 2001. I have a copy of that certificate myself—as, I believe, does the clerk to the committee. The noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, went on to pretend that Mrs Andreasen was not a high-calibre candidate, making a bogus point about linguistic requirements and adding that her pay was anyway only about €80,000 a year. But what was the Commission thinking about, anyway, if it was not trying to employ a high-calibre candidate? The reality is that Mrs Andreasen was a highly qualified, multilingual candidate. Her pay was not €80,000 but about £180,000, or some €260,000, a salary that would attract a high-quality candidate anywhere in Europe or the UK. Like my noble friend, I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, is not here to correct the misleading and defamatory statements that he made aboutMrs Andreasen, and I hope that he takes the opportunity to do so as soon as possible. Mrs Andreasen is still waiting for justice, nearly five years after her removal; her career is in a state of enforced suspension—all for trying to do the job for which she was hired.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
690 c86-7 
Session
2006-07
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
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