A Euromassacre

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s much as many in Parliament loathe the idea of going into the June elections with members of a discredited Commission still in place, naming 20 new commissioners now--subject to reapproval in June by the new Parliament--is a tall order that would strain both national governments and the Parliament itself. "It would be risky to act precipitately," says France's European Affairs Minister Pierre Moscovici, who along with the Spanish is urging the appointment of a new Commission after the June elections. The most likely outcome is a middle course: if heads of government can agree on a candidate for Commission President at Berlin or soon thereafter (see following story), he could head a caretaker team that includes many current Commissioners and then continue with fresh faces after January.

Faces that are certain not to return include those of Edith Cresson and Jacques Santer himself. Santer's failings, the report suggests, were less blatant than Cresson's but of broader scope. He was responsible for the Commission's Security Service, which was outsourced to a firm that fixed parking tickets for Commission officials, passed out jobs improperly, and even kept a lookout to see who was talking to internal auditors. Because Santer took no interest in the Security Service, the report found "a 'state within a state' was allowed to develop." Beyond that case, the report paints a devastating picture of a Commission that had lost control of its administration--a situation that starkly highlights Santer's weakness.

The other cases examined by the report reveal similar patterns: a strapped administration turns to outside providers and monitors them haphazardly; when problems are mooted, internal audits creak into action, hampered by a byzantine administrative structure that communicates poorly with the Commission and even worse with Parliament. "The programs are so fragmented that they require an administrative machinery which can't be run by civil servants alone," says Diemut Theato, a German Christian Democrat who chairs the European Parliament's budgetary control commission.

When the Commission set about the noble task of funneling humanitarian aid to the war zones of Bosnia and Africa in 1993, for instance, it apportioned some $2.6 million by way of four contracts that were, as the report states, "entirely fictitious." At least $700,000 of that money is still unaccounted for. Much of the rest went to fund so-called submarine employees in Brussels, whose essentially administrative tasks were being paid for in breach of Commission rules with money earmarked for operations. The report cited Spanish Commissioner Manuel Marin for not following through with efforts to end this practice when he was responsible for the program until the end of 1994, and for being slow to get a handle on financial irregularities in another aid program for the Mediterranean that he administered. The experts also questioned the propriety of Portuguese Commissioner Joao de Deus Pinheiro hiring his brother-in-law to a post in his private office, and of German Commissioner Monika Wulf-Mathies securing a contract for a lawyer who was married to a good friend.

In light of the report, the member states were quick to stress just how hard they had been pushing for calling the Commission to account. The French government stated that it had "ceaselessly demanded" a reform of European institutions, while the German Social Democrats claimed it was the initiative of Chancellor Schroder that led to the installation of the independent panel. Yet those claims seem disingenuous on several counts. "The real culprits in all this are the member states," says Laurens Jans Brinkhorst, a Dutch Liberal M.E.P. "Year after year, the European Council has been glaringly absent when it comes to managing the Commission's finances." Yet they are often quickly on hand to demand their share of posts of the Commission's directorate generals.