[link|http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/09/28/whistle128.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/09/28/ixworld.html|My kind of guy.]

Excerpts:

Last week, they insisted that since EU commissioners were ignorant of Eurostat's problems until this year, they could not be held responsible for what happened earlier. The frauds, and the culture that permitted them, were a one-off and had long since ended, Mr Prodi assured MEPs during a tense closed-door meeting in Strasbourg on Thursday.

From his vantage point at the independent Committee of the Regions, Mr McCoy would differ. In a devastating letter to a senior MEP, seen by The Telegraph, the 53-year-old economist details his three-year campaign to stamp out suspected fraud within the CoR, and his vain attempts to persuade senior managers to summon outside expertise to investigate the problems.

His inside account, and documents obtained by members of the European Parliament's budgetary control committee, reveals an approach by some EU officials which helps explain how at least \ufffd3 million (\ufffd2 million) could disappear from the coffers of an organisation like Eurostat without anyone noticing - or complaining.

"I felt that I had repeatedly hit a brick wall in my efforts to do my job," he wrote to Chris Heaton-Harris, a Conservative member of the committee in his letter, dated August 29. "I have nowhere else to turn, having exhausted all administrative and political avenues available to me within the CoR."

When Mr McCoy was appointed the CoR's financial controller in January 2000, he inherited a number of "serious irregularities" in expense claims from among the CoR's 222 members, who travel from all corners of the EU to meetings in Brussels at least six times a year. (None involved the CoR's 24 British or nine Irish members.)

In one kind of bogus claim, a member would buy a business-class air ticket and claim for it, then travel on a cut-price airline while obtaining a refund on the original - sometimes netting hundreds of euros profit.

Mr McCoy asked the CoR's Secretary General, Vincenzo Falcone - the senior full-time official until his own appointment was ruled improper by a European court 10 days ago - for the cases he had inherited to be reported to Olaf, the EU's anti-fraud office.

Mr Falcone apparently preferred to deal with the matter internally. Mr McCoy recalls in his letter to the MEP: "I met with a very hostile reaction and Mr Falcone rejected my request . . . out of hand."

...

However, senior CoR officials said the objection was not to the fact of Mr McCoy's investigations, but to the manner of them. According to Mr McCoy: "The Secretary General and other senior officials could not countenance anyone challenging any politician's claims, or intimating that these could be anything but above-board . . . I was merely trying to get all the CoR officials to enforce the rules . . . However, the reaction of some senior managers was extraordinarily hostile."

I say:

Ah, the old "just objecting to the way it was done" dodge. Note no mention of what manner of investigations would they have preferred. No, don't tell me. Let me guess: a manner that would not have resulted in anything getting accomplished. Like, maybe, waiting for support from the UNSC. Or giving them one last chance... after another, after another. We know the drill.

Note: the problem here isn't the fact of corruption existing. The problem is how it was handled. The sheer indifference from above is the real scandal here. There is a great deal of doubt as to whether the European Union government will be held accountable to the people - at all. Whether they will even try to implement the sort of checks and balances our founding fathers had the foresight to put in place. We don't expect freedom from corruption of any government, but we do expect it to be fought systematically and sincerely by the organization itself, so it doesn't get out of hand. The world is watching.