European Parliament: President Roberta Metsola publishes the list of her gifts in 2022

Europe 1 with AFP 6:02 p.m., January 19, 2023

The President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, has published in recent days the list of gifts she has received over the past year, as the institution tries to regain credibility after the Qatargate explosion.

A dry sausage, champagne, a scarf, a blue statuette representing a sheep, a book on "La Martinique d'antan"...: the long list of these gifts resembles a Prévert-style inventory.

Received during the last 12 months, they were recorded in a public file of the Parliament on January 12, 2023. However, the internal regulations provide that elected officials must declare the gifts no later than the end of the month following the month during which they received them.

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"Encourage transparency"

Asked by AFP, Roberta Metsola's spokesperson stressed that this approach aimed to "encourage transparency" and "to set an example" and marked a break with its predecessors.

Why not register these gifts in the public registry sooner?

The latter mentioned "a practice" according to which the presidents were not bound by this rule.

However, he assured that she would now respect this schedule.

For his part, Jaume Duch, spokesperson for the Parliament, insisted that all these gifts had been received "in the name of the institution" and that none of them were "kept by the president". .

"The unprecedented transparency" shown by Roberta Metsola "aims to improve the practice of these institutional gifts", he added.

"The President of Parliament being, in the current system, the only person who can enforce the ethical rules, she must be exemplary in her conduct", for his part underlined, in a tweet, Alberto Alemanno, professor of law of the European Union at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC).

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14 measures to reform the institution

For Nicholas Aiossa, of the NGO Transparency International, this initiative by the president, but also, moreover, by many other elected officials, on gifts and travel, is welcome but it is the demonstration that the "system does not work ".

The problem within the European Parliament is that non-compliance with the rules "rarely leads to sanctions", he explains to AFP.

"We need rules that are written and that are not just traditions. We need a lot more controls. And we need sanctions that have a real deterrent effect," he adds.

Shaken by this corruption scandal involving Qatar and Morocco in which Greek Socialist MEP Eva Kaili was locked up, the European Parliament is trying to restore its image.

Roberta Metsola presented last week to the presidents of the parliamentary groups a package of 14 measures aimed at reforming the institution and fighting against foreign interference.

Among these are the restriction of access to the European Parliament to former elected officials, who until now had free access, or the inclusion in the transparency register of all external stakeholders.