One of the European Commission’s top transport officials has resigned following revelations that he accepted multiple junkets to Qatar while negotiating a high-stakes aviation treaty with the Gulf state. Henrik Hololei, Director General of the Commission’s transport department, announced his resignation in an internal email on Wednesday, March 29th, after Politico revealed that he had accepted the trips and even signed off on his ethics account.
Despite accusations of unethical behaviour, Hololei will move to a new role as a political adviser in the Commission’s internal partnerships wing, specialising in international development. There had been earlier reports of an internal campaign to get Hololei out due to the bad publicity engendered by the revelations.
Hololei accepted the junkets while negotiating a controversial open-skies agreement with Qatar which granted the country access to the European market in what some have labelled a favourable deal for Doha.
Hololei’s departure comes at a bad time for Brussels, which is wrestling with allegations of institutional corruption in the form of Qatargate and accusations that top EU officials are compromised by their financial links to foreign powers. The EU is supposedly preparing its own ‘foreign agents law’ similar to existing legislation in the United States to clamp down on foreign-backed influence operations perpetrated on Eurocrats.
Hololei’s experiences were cited as evidence by Bruno Waterfield, Brussels correspondent of The Times, at a recent MCC event on the topic of Qatargate as an example of the “caste identity” among the Brussels elite, which helped perpetuate endemic corruption.
