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The levels of expenses there are completely outrageous, and almost totally unmonitored

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13/04/2014

The levels of expenses there are completely outrageous, and almost totally unmonitored. On top of their €7,957 monthly salary, MEPs get €4299 paid directly into their personal bank account for “general expenditure”, no questions asked, no receipts required.

The system is so broken the EU actually refuses to pay it to anywhere but a personal account in the MEP’s name.

On top of that, they get €152 for every day they turn up in parliament – and €152 euros more if they vote more than 50 per cent of the time. This has led bonkers situations like the Romanian MEP who has never spoken and votes “yes” to literally everything. It’s Kafkaesque – as he votes “yes” at every division, he’s voted in a contradictory fashion at least 63 times, according to Der Spiegel. It’s a very strong possibility he’s just doing this to collect his attendance cash.

In addition, there’s €21,209 per month for staff costs (frequently paid to wives, children or family friends). All travel between the home country and the parliament (which moves, of course) is reimbursed at cost, as well as distance and duration of travel payments and on top of that, there’s a mileage allowance of up to €12,000 – no receipts required for journeys of less than 800km.

It’s not just southern or eastern European MEPs making a killing on all these allowances either. Journalists at a prominent BBC current affairs show have told me they have been looking into claims of

a British MEP claiming back mileage in order to visit his mistress in Denmark – the 766km between Brussels and Copenhagen being conveniently under the “no receipts” mileage limit. As expenses, this is all tax free, of course.

It’s not just the MEPs making a killing, either. There’s a legion of MEP’s staffers and minor bureaucrats on the take too. A Labour Party acquaintance, an MEP’s staffer, told me he was offered a job on Andy Burnham’s team, “but couldn’t afford to take the pay cut working for the shadow cabinet would involve”. In particular, anyone connected with the parliament makes out like a bandit on tax.

They pay tax at about a 13.5 per cent (lower than almost any rate in the EU), but on top of that, can claim back practically any VAT they pay. A common dodge is if any family member is about to buy any hefty purchase – a car, for example – then the MEP’s staffer will buy it, saving their family a fortune. One EU staffer told me she’d heard of people claiming back VAT on laser eye surgery for their relatives.

Of course, in the modern age there’s absolutely no practical reason we couldn’t have absolute transparency on all of this. It would be easy to monitor the spending of EU politicians (indeed, of any politician) in any number of ways, and thus slash spending on these boondoggles.

The problem is, the EU’s expenses system is disastrously, titanically corrupt, and MEPs (especially from countries where political graft is a given) will never accept the most basic levels of scrutiny and transparency. The inability of the EU to perform even the most basic housekeeping functions is a powerful argument for us being better off out. If they can’t fix this sort of thing, how on earth can we trust them to reform systems like CAP, or govern effectively at all?

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