“There is now a higher alertness to bribery, fraud and corruption”

Eva Kaili, like all other MEPs who were in prison for Qatargate, was allowed to leave the cell. Political scientist Hendrik Vos outlines the situation Business AM.

Listen to the full conversation with Hendrik Vos here.

What preceded: At the end of last year, some members of the European Parliament were caught red-handed with large sums of bribes, one and a half million euros, presumably paid by Qatar and Morocco to polish up their image within the European Parliament.

• “Everyone who was detained has now been released, but the investigation is still ongoing,” explains Vos. “Eva Kaili is among them, also Marc Tarabella and Antonio Panzeri. The latter is prepared as a regret to put everything he knows on the table. Yes, then the other people who are involved and who are mentioned will be in a tight spot.”
• “It’s about money laundering, corruption, organized crime… Those are pretty much the allegations that are being made, but as long as the investigation is going on, it’s hard to get much information on that officially. You can feel that the investigators have a strong case.”
• “Between the lines you can also hear that it was all handled a bit amateurishly. They called each other without encrypting the conversations, they met in hotel rooms where they were filmed by surveillance cameras, and so on.”

Acquittal

• Still, Eva Kaili would argue for the acquittal. “At first glance, that seems to me to be very difficult,” says Vos. “If I’m right, she says she was misled by her partner, by Panzeri, one of the key figures who was arrested. She will now try to maintain that she was misled and that she got those banknotes for it, to what extent that will be convincing in a court of law I still have to see. Anyway, everyone is innocent until proven guilty.”
• “For the European Parliament, the whole Qatargate is of course a bad thing. On the other hand, in December it was said that it was only the tip of the iceberg and that more was to come to light. That didn’t happen. It all appears to be quite concentrated to a number of people.”
• “We are now looking at it with a magnifying glass,” says Vos. “There is a greater alertness to bribery, fraud and corruption and you can actually see that in all institutions at the moment.”

(ns)