Each member of the European Parliament gets €4,342 per month, mainly to fund an office in his or her own country, but the offices of 249 MEPs are nowhere to be found, according to a report by Investigative Reporting Denmark published on Wednesday 31 May and relayed by the organisation Transparency International, amongst others.
So far, 133 of the 748 current MEPs have declared what they pay in office rent, the authors state.
Each MEP receives a General Expenditure Allowance to cover costs incurred in the home member state, such as the cost of running the MEP's office, telephone and postal charges and the purchase, use and maintenance of IT and telephony equipment. The allowance is halved for MEPs who fail to attend at least half of all plenary sessions in a parliamentary year (from September to August) with no valid justification. In 2017, this allowance stands at €4,342 per month.
However, the journalists of Investigative Reporting Denmark believe that some of this money may be being misused. A series of investigations carried out in all 28 member states revealed at least 42 cases in which MEPs are paying rent to their national political parties or even into their own personal accounts. In 249 cases, the MEPs declared that they did not have an office, refused to give the address, or the office could not be found, according to the investigation. The report argues that expenditure in this sector escapes any scrutiny on the part of Parliament.
The MEPs themselves seemed to have quite a varied understanding of how the allowance can be used. Many claimed to spend the whole sum every month on office equipment, Internet and other work-related costs. “Some also included travel expenses for visitors, charity donations and payments to their national party as general expenditure”, the journalists report. They found that in Germany, eight MEPs of various political parties personally owned the buildings in which their national offices were located. These allegedly include Manfred Weber, the chair of the EPP group. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)