The European Ombudsman has granted the European Parliament’s bureau a two-month extension to submit a detailed opinion on the Ombudsman’s recommendation that it publishes the accounts of its members.
The issue relates to MaltaToday’s complaint with the Ombudsman over the European Parliament’s refusal to grant it access to the payments – daily allowances, assistants’ salaries and travel allowances – paid to Malta’s five MEPs after it was refused access back in August 2005.
In September 2007, Ombudsman Paraskavas Nikiforos Diamandouros recommended the Parliament to reconsider MaltaToday’s application and grant it access after finding the EP had no “appropriate legal basis for rejecting the complainant’s application for access”.
An opinion by the Bureau, which groups the president of the European Parliament Hans-Gert Pöttering and the presidents of the political blocs, had to be submitted by 10 December.
Pöttering informed Diamandouros that the Bureau is examining the practices of the Member States with a view to providing a full and detailed response.
He said that since the research carried out with national parliaments is still incomplete, a two-month extension to the deadline was being requested.
MaltaToday’s complaint and its subsequent upholding by the Ombudsman became a historic first for a Maltese newspaper, in its bid to make MEPs’ payments and expenditure transparent and open to the public.
In his decision, Diamandouros had found that the European Parliament’s arguments to refuse access were neither convincing nor justified, and constituted maladministration.
He said the fact that Parliament failed to even consider granting partial access to documents containing data related to assistants, for example by blanking out the assistants’ names, also constituted maladministration.
“The Ombudsman concludes that Parliament wrongly rejected in its entirety the complainant’s access for access to the data… This constitutes maladministration.”
The decision is important because it has won the public the right to know what their elected MEP earns every year, and to know how these funds are utilised by their MEPs to achieve what they achieved.
Diamandouros also reiterated the opinion by European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx, who was asked to submit his views on the complaint. In his observations, Hustinx said “it seems obvious that these data must be disclosed”, and that although the case dealt with the personal data of MEPs, “in a transparent and democratic society, the basic consideration must be that the public has a right to be informed about their behaviour. MEPs must be aware of this public interest.”
Diamandouros also said that the parliament’s dismissal of MaltaToday’s arguments that MEPs’ accounts had to be subject to public scrutiny because these were already audited internally, was “not relevant”. “… the Ombudsman regards as invalid the argument put forward by an institution examining an application that the same end the applicant wishes to achieve by requesting access to certain documents may be achieved by other means… Parliament’s reference to financial checks by the responsible bodies is not relevant in the context of this case.”
Both the presidents of the European Parliament, socialist Josep Borrel and EPP MEP Hans-Gert Pöttering stood by the Parliament’s refusal to grant MaltaToday access to the accounts.

mvella@mediatoday.com.mt