Brussels, 31/01/2014 (Agence Europe) - Long awaited by the NGOs working in this field, the first internal EU report on corruption, that the European Commission had announced in 2011, will be presented on Monday 3 February by the commissioner for internal affairs, Cecilia Malmström.
The report will, for the first time, study the phenomenon of corruption in the 28 member states of the European Union and, among other things, will focus on public procurement aspects. The Commission, as it had pointed out in 2011, is making a compilation of existing data from NGO reports or international organisations. For Transparency International, however, although the report is not expected to teach them anything new about the phenomenon of corruption, it at least has the merit of taking stock of the situation for each member state and stating in black and white what problems have been detected, the association explained on Friday 31 January.
There is, however, a glitch. The chapter that the Commission was initially to devote to the European institutions has been removed. The Commission will therefore not study the extent of corruption within the institutions this time. NGOs consider the case of OLAF (European Anti-Fraud Office) and John Dalli (former health commissioner who had to resign after an alleged case of influence peddling in dealings with the tobacco industry) has something to do with this removal. From the Commission, it is affirmed that it was not deemed relevant to make a self-evaluation, even if this special chapter on the institutions was planned from the outset. “The idea of the anti-corruption report is to have an objective third party, and independent academic studies - which does not yet exist”, circles close to Malmström say. It is pointed out, moreover, that Transparency International is currently carrying out its own inquiry into the extent of corruption within the institutions, which will constitute a first independent database. The NGO is to publish the results of its inquiry in April.
In the meantime, NGOs are raising another question. Why is this report, due mid-2013, so long in coming? Several member states, including Italy, are, according to some sources, said to have expressed great reservation about the report and to have delayed publication. In theory, the methodology used by the Commission should put all member states on an equal footing and spare none of them. To date, it is only in Romania and Bulgaria that the Commission has openly assessed the degree of corruption of those in public life, within the framework of the cooperation and verification mechanism. (SP/transl.jl)