By Martin Banks - 24th April 2009
Member states and parliament have continued to turn a blind eye to this shameful waste
Declan Ganley
MEPs have voted against plugging a huge gap in the MEPs' voluntary pension scheme with taxpayer's cash.
The institution's voluntary supplementary pension scheme for MEPs currently has a deficit of some €120m because of the global economic downturn.
There were fears that MEPs would sanction parliamentary funds - effectively taxpayers' money - being used to meet the massive shortfall.
However, the assembly's influential bureau decided against this option.
At a meeting in Strasbourg this week, the body - parliament's president Hans-Gert Pottering and 14 vice-presidents - confirmed its decision taken three weeks earlier not to make provisions for covering any losses.
It did, however, recognise that "parliament has a legal obligation to guarantee the pension rights of the current members of the fund".
A parliament spokesman said, "Even under the present difficult conditions, the MEPs' additional pension fund will be able to honour its commitments until well into the 2020s.
"It is hoped that with the measures confirmed this week the fund will be able to continue to do this for as long as is necessary, taking into account that the fund is being phased out with the application of the single statute for members in July and that its commitments are therefore finite."
At present, pensions are the responsibility of member states according to their own systems. There is a voluntary scheme to which those MEPs taking part pay a one-third contribution and parliament pays two-thirds.
To address the deficit, the bureau this week confirmed that it will raise the age of which MEPs can benefit from the supplementary scheme from 60 to 63.
Members will no longer be able to take early retirement at 50 and will no longer be able to take 25 per cent of their pension entitlement as a lump sum.
Meanwhile, parliament on Thursday approved the EU's 2007 budget despite serious misgivings in a European Court of Auditors' report. The report says that €4.62bn has been spent in error for cohesion policies alone.
For 13 years in a row the European Court of Auditors refused to give a clean opinion on the EU accounts. While the court provided a clean opinion for the 2007 accounts, 54 per cent of the accounts were not approved and the auditors stated that their "opinion on the underlying transactions remains broadly similar to that of last year".
The auditors' report also stated that EU payments "have a too high level of error" and that of the €42bn paid out under cohesion policies "at least 11 per cent of the reimbursed cost claims should not have been paid out".
Declan Ganley, leader of the anti-Lisbon treaty group Libertas, said, "Member states and parliament have continued to turn a blind eye to this shameful waste. To discharge the EU accounts which are rife with error at the taxpayers' expense shows their belief that they are answerable and accountable to no one."
Ganley added, "We will publish the names of those MEPs who vote to discharge these accounts and let them answer to their constituents."
As they have in the past, British Tory MEPs voted against discharge.
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