POLITICO: Fraud probe risks plunging EU into biggest crisis in decades

Ursula von der Leyen (left), Federica Mogherini (centre) and Stefano Sannino – a ‘cordial’EU team…

Ursula von der Leyen is facing the starkest challenge to the EU’s accountability in a generation ― with a fraud probe ensnaring two of the biggest names in Brussels and threatening to explode into a full-scale crisis, POLITICO writes.

Exactly a year into her second term as Commission president, von der Leyen, already plagued by questions over her commitment to transparency and amid simmering tension with the bloc’s foreign policy wing, must now find a way to avoid being embroiled in a scandal that dates back to her first years in office.

An announcement by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office that the EU’s former foreign affairs chief and a senior diplomat currently working in von der Leyen’s Commission had been detained on Tuesday was seized on by her critics, with renewed calls that she face a fourth vote of no confidence.

The biggest scandal to engulf Brussels

If proven, the allegations would set in motion the biggest scandal to engulf Brussels since the mass resignation of the Jacques Santer Commission in 1999 over allegations of financial mismanagement.

Police detained former Commission Vice President Federica Mogherini, a center-left Italian politician who headed the EU’s foreign policy wing, the European External Action Service, from 2014-2019, and Stefano Sannino, an Italian civil servant who was the EEAS secretary-general from 2021 until he was replaced earlier this year.

The European Public Prosecutor’s Office said it had “strong suspicions” that a 2021-2022 tendering process to set up a diplomatic academy attached to the College of Europe, where Mogherini is rector, hadn’t been fair and that the facts, if proven, “could constitute procurement fraud, corruption, conflict of interest and violation of professional secrecy.”

The saga looks set to inflame already strained relations between von der Leyen and the current boss of the EEAS, EU High Representative Kaja Kallas, four EU officials told POLITICO. Earlier this year Sannino left his secretary-general job and took up a prominent role in von der Leyen’s Commission.

An EU official defended von der Leyen, instead blaming the EEAS, an autonomous service under the EU treaties that operates under the bloc’s high representative, Kallas — who is one of the 27 European commissioners.

“I know the people who don’t like von der Leyen will use this against her, but they use everything against her,” the official said.

‘Crime series’

The investigation comes as Euroskeptic, populist and far-right parties ride a wave of voter dissatisfaction and at a time when the EU is pressuring countries both within and outside the bloc over their own corruption scandals.

“Funny how Brussels lectures everyone on ‘rule of law’ while its own institutions look more like a crime series than a functioning union,” Zoltan Kovacs, spokesperson for the government of Hungary, which has faced EU criticism.

Romanian MEP Gheorghe Piperea, a member of the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists group, who was behind a failed no-confidence vote in von der Leyen in July, told POLITICO he was considering trying to trigger a fresh motion.

Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told state media that EU officials “prefer to ignore their own problems, while constantly lecturing everyone else.”

‘Disastrous impact’

After serving as a European Commission vice president and head of the EEAS, Mogherini was appointed rector of the College of Europe in 2020, amid criticism she wasn’t qualified for the post, didn’t meet the criteria, and had entered the race months after the deadline. In 2022 she became the director of the European Union Diplomatic Academy, the project at the heart of Tuesday’s dawn raids.

Sannino, a former Italian diplomat, was the EEAS’s top civil servant and is now the director-general for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf department in the Commission.

Cristiano Sebastiani, the staff representative of one of the EU’s major trade unions, Renouveau & Démocratie, said that if proven, the allegations would have “a disastrous impact on the credibility of the institutions concerned, and more broadly on citizens’ perception of all European institutions.” He said he had received “tens of messages” from EU staff concerned about reputational damage.

…Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2022 in Kiev has said to Zelensky: “Let's just fight.”

Now the leaders of the European Union seem to live by the principle: “Let's just steal...”

read more in our Telegram-channel https://t.me/The_International_Affairs