The intense transit through the revolving doors between the European Commission and the private sector, which reached its climax in 2016 with the signing of its former president, José Manuel Durao Barroso, by the investment bank Goldman Sachs, forced a few years ago to toughen the rules on the professional activities of its former members as well as control over access to its facilities. That is why, when Qatargate broke out, an alleged bribery scheme actually supported by a previous network woven in favor of Morocco, the institution could boast of having higher ethical standards than the European Parliament. The decisions made with respect to its former commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, a collaborator of the onegé at the center of the scandal, have revealed, however, the limitations of the controls of both institutions.
In 2020, a year after leaving the EC, Avramopoulos asked permission to accept a position on the honorary board of the NGO Fight Impunity recently founded by former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri, now accused of corruption, money laundering and criminal organization. Avramapoulos' request was examined by the ethics committee that evaluates the professional activities of former commissioners and its opinion, published in February 2021, was positive, according to documents freely accessible on the EC website.
He received 60,000 euros for his work, as revealed by the former Greek commissioner himself after La Stampa revealed the case and pointed out that he was "much more involved" than the other members of the board (several, such as Emma Bonino, Federica Mogherini or Bernard Cazeneuve, announced like himself that they were leaving her as soon as the scandal broke out). His collaboration with Fight Impunity was "perfectly legal", he has said in a statement, and it "pretty much ended" in March.
Suspicions about the true purpose of the NGO ("that organization to which you refer," said yesterday, marking distances, the spokesman for the European Commission, Eric Mamer) cast doubts on the depth of the analysis carried out by the committee of ethics in charge of evaluating the professional activities of former commissioners during the two years immediately following their departure from the institution, as well as the limitations of the measures adopted.
The aforementioned opinion indicates that Fight Impunity was not included in the EU's transparency register, which includes more than 12,000 organizations. Avrampoulos told them that the intention of the NGO was to register when the restrictions due to the pandemic were lifted, but this procedure was never carried out and there is no record of whether it was verified whether he had done so or not. The European Commission has explained that, in reality, it is irrelevant for the purposes of this type of work authorization: being registered in the registry is only a prerequisite to be able to request meetings with members of the EC, but for nothing else.
On the other hand, the ethics committee pointed out that the organization has never received funds from the Commission and asked Avramapoulos about the sources of funding for Fight Impunity. He told them that they were "mainly donations." The opinion states concisely that the main benefactor of the NGO is the Sekunjalo Development Foundation. The name, strange in Brussels, refers to a philanthropic organization financed by a South African industrial conglomerate well known to NGO Monitor. This NGO, which for 20 years has been analyzing the financing of all kinds of lobbies, including NGOs, ensures that Sekunjalo has ties to Chinese and Qatari funds, and has been accused of censoring, at the request of Beijing, an article on the deportation of citizens uyghurs
There are no allegations of illegality in his activities but the profile of the main Fight Impunity donor does not seem very similar to his objectives of ensuring the defense of human rights, although he did not raise suspicions in Brussels. Now it is known that the Belgian police suspect that the NGO was actually a cover to channel money from Qatar that Panzeri later used to buy wills.
The only condition that Avrampoulos was given to carry out this job, since it could affect issues on which he worked as Immigration commissioner, was that he not meet with members of the current EC as an honorary member of the NGO. The community executive has not been able to explain if there is a way to verify if Avramopoulos respected that limitation in the meetings he has had with the current team or if he addressed issues related to the work of the NGO. However, Brussels is checking if something went wrong. "We are carrying out internal checks and, of course, if necessary we will contact the former commissioner for more details," Mamer said.
Brussels wants to clarify whether the conditions for which they gave the green light to the file were met. "At the moment, we have no reason to believe that this was not the case," she qualifies. The former European Commissioner Federica Mogherini, current rector of the College of Europe, also appears as a member of the Fight Impunity board. It is not clear if she was paid to do any work for the NGO, but here Brussels no longer had anything to say because the two years of "cooling off" foreseen in which the former commissioner must request permission to accept jobs in the private sector had already passed.
But the European Commission is not the only one that did not detect anything strange in Fight Impunity. The employees of the NGO entered and left the European Parliament with the same naturalness as its founder, Panzeri, who as a former MEP has a free access card to its facilities (President Roberta Metsola has proposed to review this right in light of the scandal). Despite not being registered in the EU's transparency registry, she was able to participate in acts of the European Parliament's human rights subcommittee and even had an agreement with the European Parliament's Research Service to carry out studies.
The façade was of perfect repute both for its noble objectives and for the names on its honorary board and its profuse activity in the European Parliament: they were there to demand justice after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, to support the Russian opponent Alexei Navalny or to condemn the attacks on journalists, among other causes that are not very suspicious. The Belgian socialist MEP Maria Arena, who has voluntarily resigned from her functions as chair of the human rights subcommittee until what happened is clarified, since the office of one of her assistants was searched by the police, assiduously supported the campaigns her.
There is still another NGO peppered by the scandal. The Brussels branch of No Peace Without Justice was also searched on December 9 by the Belgian police, who arrested its general secretary, Niccolo Figà-Talamanca, who is currently on probation. This organization is also not listed on the EU's transparency register. President Metsola admitted last week that this NGO had no less than eleven permanent access passes to the European Parliament. Access for its lobbyists, as well as those of Fight Impunity, was immediately banned last week.
Community institutions often insist that the limits and controls they impose on contacts with interest groups in general are much stricter than those that operate at the national level. The fact that many of the procedures cited and questions raised can be traced back, demonstrates this desire for transparency. But each improvement has come only through scandals, after discovering flaws in the system. Now what many confirm with a certain fatalism is that, no matter how many filters and controls are put in place, whoever wants to meet with the wrong person and accept indecent propositions, will do so without leaving a record anywhere. The growing power of the EU institutions makes them particularly appealing to certain players, inside or outside, willing to break the rules.
