MEPs meeting in plenary decided almost unanimously on Tuesday 13 December to end the mandate of European Parliament Vice-President Eva Kaili (S&D, Greek) (625 votes in favour, one against, two abstentions), who is currently imprisoned in Brussels in relation to the suspicions of corruption by Qatar that are shaking the European Parliament (see EUROPE 13082/1).
This procedure was triggered by a decision of the Conference of Presidents (CoP) on the morning of Tuesday 13 December, under Rule 21 of the European Parliament’s Rules of Procedure. “Parliament will continue to fully support the work of the police and the judiciary to ensure that justice is done. There will be no impunity”, says a joint statement from the CoP.
The President of the S&D, Iratxe García Pérez, announced that she had asked the leaders of the political group to “launch an analysis of all the files that could be affected”.
In addition to Kaili, Iratxe García Pérez announced that MEPs and/or those with assistants under investigation will have “no further responsibilities in the European Parliament and in the S&D” during the legal proceedings.
The S&D and most of the European Parliament groups are also calling for the establishment of an internal European Parliament board of inquiry. For his part, French MEP Raphaël Glucksmann (S&D) is in favour of changing the European Parliament’s Special Committee on Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes (‘INGE’), rather than creating a new committee.
“A different mandate will have to be voted on. They are not the same statutes, but the problem is that if we create a commission from scratch, it will take several months just to form it”, he said.
The judicial investigation is ongoing. New searches were carried out on Tuesday in Brussels and the office of Pietro Bartolo’s (S&D, Italian) parliamentary assistant was sealed off in the Parliament building in Strasbourg.
Since the beginning of the case on Friday 9 December, more than 20 searches have been carried out by the Belgian authorities, who seized over one and a half million euros from the homes of both Ms Kaili and Pier Antonio Panzeri - a former MEP and president of the Italian NGO Fight Impunity - as well as from a room in a Brussels hotel.
See the CoP statement: https://aeur.eu/f/4ne (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)