EU Whistleblower Wins a Seat in Brussels
by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Anti-Brussels crusaders made their first breakthrough in the European elections yesterday with the victory of Paul van Buitenen, the Dutch whistleblower whose anti-Brussels crusaders made their first big breakthrough in the European elections revelations brought down the European Commission in 1999.

Catching the Dutch media off-guard, Mr van Buitenen's new Europa Transparant party won 7.3 percent of the national vote, securing two of the country's 27 seats. Starved of press coverage and excluded from televised debates, he relied on word of mouth and the Internet to spread his message.

Holland has released an early tally of Thursday's vote, defying a security diktat imposed by Brussels until Sunday night after polls have closed across all 25 European Union states. Britain is obeying the ban.

The count shows a slight swing to the Labour opposition as the centre-Right coalition paid a price for economic recession and for supporting the Iraq war.

Mr van Buitenen - a Eurocleaner, not a Eurosceptic - triggered the resignation of the Commission for fraud, nepotism and dirty tricks. He was an auditor at the time and was suspended on half-pay and disciplined for breaching staff rules by revealing abuses to Euro-MPs after his superiors tried to cover them up.

He has carried on the fight, claiming that nothing has changed under the new team and the villains of the 1999 scandal have been shielded by the old-boy network in Brussels, in some cases moving on to top posts. He will now have a staff, ample resources and a platform on the parliament's budget watchdog. "I know all the questions that have to be asked and I'm going to get some answers," he said.

Dutch voters have become increasingly tetchy about Brussels now that they are the biggest net contributors to the EU budget.

Sensing the new mood, the government has begun demanding the "repatriation" of farm aid and regional funds which make up 80 percent of EU spending.

A new book by Mr van Buitenen, In the Brussels Trenches, is a scathing indictment of reforms by Neil Kinnock, the commission vice-president in charge of the Eurocracy - and briefly his boss with an office just down the corridor.

Mr Kinnock took over in 1999 pledging to pull the commission out of 40 years of "frozen bureaucracy", but the book accuses him of shielding miscreants and preserving the system of fiefdoms run by EU insiders to suit themselves.

"Neil Kinnock is the real antagonist of my book. His reforms are a huge hoax. There's no use in putting new rules into place when the real problem is total failure to enforce the rules we already had," said Mr. Van Buitenen.

He said Mr Kinnock ignored warnings that millions of euros were vanishing into illegal slush funds at the EU's data office, Eurostat, until the scandal broke in the press. To this day nobody has taken political responsibility for the affair.

Mr Kinnock's spokesman said the reforms were transforming the management culture of the commission's 20,000 staff, ensuring that no Eurostat-style scandal could happen again.

Mr van Buitenen accuses the EU's new anti-fraud office Olaf of swallowing evidence into a black hole and misusing the criminal justice system to seize the source files of a German journalist who had exposed Olaf corruption.
The Daily Telegraph, 12th June 2004

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