Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Slush fund of €234,000 pays for summer camps in Malta for Eurocrats’ children


The children of Brussels eurocrats will head to the Italian Alps next week for a subsidised ski holiday, thanks to the European Parliament’s ultimate slush fund – a e234,000 annual budget to pay for staff jollies.

The discovery of taxpayer-assisted holidays for the children of up to 80 EU civil servants has led to an outcry among MEPs – themselves no strangers to accusations of largesse, thanks to their generous expenses, salaries, pensions and allowances.

Details of the holidays, which include one ski trip and four summer camps every year, are hard to find because they are listed in the annual European Parliament accounts under the innocuous-sounding entry “Social services – social interventions”.

The details came to light after questions from MEPs, who are demanding a better audit of how the European Parliament’s e1.5 billion annual budget is spent.

The ski trip last year, for example, was subsidised to the tune of e53,000, with staff who earn e78,000 a year entitled to half the approximate e900 cost of the trip from the fund.

A total of 97 children were sent on four subsidised summer camps in 2008, the last year for which the European Parliament would give details. They were held in France, Malta, Germany and the UK.

Daniël van der Stoep, a Dutch MEP who has called on the European Commission to analyse the use of these funds, said: “I am a new MEP here and I am amazed every day by some new way they have of spending money.”

The European Parliament said that it had placed under review the amount of money used by the Staff Committee for children’s holidays, with a view to spending the money on the children of the lowest-paid personnel.

Source:independent.com.mt/

No comments:

Post a Comment