Thursday, December 04, 2008 at 11:04
By Raymond Frenken
PRISTINA, Kosovo (EUX.TV) — A prominent lawyer is stepping up his drive to have investigated irregularities at EU-managed ‘political studies’ programs in eastern Europe and the Balkans that have received more than 2 million euro in EU funding since 2002.
The allegations target a program known as EIDHR, which stands for “European instrument for Democracy and Human Rights”. The commissioners responsible for this program are Benita Ferrero-Waldner (external relations), Louis Michel (development) and Jose Manuel Barroso, as president of the commission.
Professor David Lempert, described on the Wikipedia website as “author, social entrepreneur, lawyer and international development consultant”, said he wants to push further his complaints about abuse of funds at EIDHR after the European Commission on Sunday missed a deadline to deliver information to the European ombudsman.
“From the information I brought to you almost a year and a half ago, it would have been child’s play for any lawyer to see that several officials in the EC, up to Secretary General Catherine Day, have been guilty of breaking their laws in the evaluations process by firing independent evaluators who discover fraud and then directing the falsification of evaluations,” Lempert writes in an email to the ombudsman that he also sent to leaders of political groups in the parliament.
Speaking by telephone from Brussels, European Commission spokesman Max Strottmann told EUX.TV that the EU’s executive is aware of the complaints raised by Lempert and that these are under investigation by Olaf, the Commission’s anti-fraud unit.
Mr Lempert “was a contractor of a contractor for the Commission, and not a contractor of the commission,” said Strottmann. He said Olaf’s investigation did not turn up any new evidence that justified further investigation, and that the Commission is “fully cooperating with the ombudsman”.
According to Lempert, irregularities took place with EIDHR and the “Network of Schools of Political Studies”.
According to a evaluation commission report on the EIDHR project, 2.1 million euro in EU funds has been given to this project since 2002, mostly to political studies institutes in countries like Bosnia, Georgia, Kosovo, Moldova, Russia and Macedonia.
The project also involves the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe.
Learn more about the EIDHR project at its website: http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/where/worldwide/eidhr/index_en.htm
A specific search on the EU’s Europa webserver shows Lempert as key contributor of an official 2007 report evaluating the “political studies network.”
Lempert, however, claims that his conclusion has been changed without being consulted. His names appears twice in the report, including on the cover page, together with that of Pierre Robert as team leader of the team that evaluated the spending on the EIDHR project.
To find the controversial evaluation report:
http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/where/worldwide/eidhr/documents/final_report_ec_schools_evaluation_280807_en.pdf
The ombudsman last wrote to European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso about this case on the 1st of October. In that letter, ombudsman Nikiforos Diamandouros gave the Commission until the 30th of November to provide the required information. That deadline passed tonight.
Lempert argues that through his ineffective action, the European ombudsman is complicit in the “lawbreaking.”
From his communications with the ombudsman, it becomes clear that Lempert is concerned about “a lack of whistleblower protection” for commission officials who are to evaluate projects, and that the Commission has passed on the allegations to its OLAF anti-fraud unit.
“I do not know whether I should be crying for Europe and for your office or just laughing at you,” he writes in his latest email to the ombudsman. “If there were any semblance of law and process in European institutions and your office, either your office would have resolved this matter MORE THAN A YEAR ago and you would be a hero, or you would be out on the streets and pilloried for contributing to waste of public money and mockery of the ideal of a united Europe following principles of accountability and rule of law.”
Many elements of the EIHDR case remain to be cleared up. The European Commission and EU institutions in general already have a history of trying to cover up internal irregularities.
Just last month, complaints raised by Dutch whistleblower and MEP Paul van Buitenen were proven legitimate after the European Court of Justice confirmed that the appointment of a senior official at OLAF itself was irregular. Until that ruling, the commission, and the parliament, had managed to dismiss Van Buitenen’s allegation.
Here follows an excerpt from Lempert’s latest email to the European ombudsman:
“Now, after all of these months, NO ONE is holding them accountable, including your office,” Lempert writes in his mail to the ombudsman, that was also sent to leading members of the European Parliament and to EUX.TV.
“By just sending them another copy of the charges against them exposing their law-breaking in every detail and the ineffectiveness of the “Anti-Fraud Office” that allows fraud to continue when committed by fellow officials, you certainly know that they are going to do one of two things, or both.
1) To avoid blame, they are going to resort to character assassination against me, as they have already started, in attempt to muddy the issues of their law-breaking.
2) They are going to offer more theater of the absurd rationalizations that try to explain something that only Orwell or Kafka could possibly top, about how their violation of the law is actually support for a law, or how they are the law unto themselves.
By allowing and encouraging them to do that, this now also makes your office responsible for aiding and abetting that lawbreaking.
I feel almost ridiculous asking you these rhetorical questions since it looks like your office is just playing charades with me, but since I have to at least assume that you might wake up and the situation might change, I am compelled to go through the motions:
- Now, when EC officials finally do answer, with a response like all of their previous writings to me and to you (at citizen expense), that even you now recognize as evasive and unresponsive if not outright fraudulent, what will you do? Will you send me these responses – that will almost certainly be a mockery and possibly also an attempt at character assassination of a lawyer who brings a complaint and more evidence of the very violations I am asking your office to help stop — and keep a straight face, asking again for my comments and responses?
- How gross a violation of law and public spending does it actually take before you will initiate actual legal actions and push discipline against the office of Catherine Day or tell the citizens of Europe that you need real powers in order to protect them and do your job?
- How gross a violation of law and public spending does it actually take before you work on any real reforms that are standard practice in a real public system, and that I have been urging you to support for more than a year?
- How many months, years, and decades can we keep this circus going of correspondence over lawbreaking without anyone on your end actually stopping the lawbreaking? Does this just continue on to your retirement, to the collapse of the EU, to the next Ice Age? Can we pass it on to our grandchildren to continue this forever, to see how long this can actually go?
- How does your office really work? Are you just a postal service passing letters back and forth, or are you a participant in the process of sending all of the allegations of serious legal violations and the names of the people who find them directly to the perpetrators so that they can use them to protect themselves and to reinforce the very mechanisms of blacklisting and falsification that your office is supposed to help stop? How can you now claim to be a neutral party or on the side of the public, given that you have bent over backwards to give the EC officials who have violated their own rules every possible opportunity to delay any accountability and to come up with excuses?
- Does this process escalate on your end against complainants like me or is this process just designed to humor me or to try to tire me out? (For now, I enjoy the comic relief so much that I find it refreshing and rejuvenating. How could I allow this hilarity to stop when it provides such wonderful entertainment for friends, students, and colleagues?)
- Will I again have to answer every attempt at character assassination and bureaucratic obfuscation and evasiveness that is thrown at me in order to show that I do not agree to your “closing” of this case, and continue to do all of your work for you in rebutting this continuing criminality by EC officials, or will you finally stand up and work to stop their violations immediately, as you should already have done?
- It is very lucky for you and the EC so far that the media and the European Parliament have not had enough of these complaints and have not taken them seriously enough to put real heat on your office and on the EC. I can always go on to other work, but I’m wondering how long you all think your luck will hold out, especially as the global economy worsens and Europe’s citizens start looking more closely at where their money is going and what their public servants are actually doing. Do you really think you can avoid public accountability and postpone forceful and direct action forever?
I’m sorry to have to respond this way, but when someone makes it very clear to me that they are trying to make a monkey out of me, as your office has, there is really no other way for me to respond other than to put a sign on your door that you are running a circus,” writes Lempert.
– From the EUX.TV newsroom news@eux.tv
