Then High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, Italy’s Federica Mogherini, speaks during a press conference with Colombian President Iván Duque (out of frame) in Bogotá, Colombia on September 12, 2019.
Raul Arboleda / AFP
Reports say a former EU foreign policy chief, who now holds a significant post elsewhere, has been taken in for questioning.
European public trust in Brussels has been dealt another blow this week, after Belgian police raided the European Union’s diplomatic service and the College of Europe—widely known as the bloc’s ‘finishing school’ for Eurocrats—as part of a fraud probe.
National authorities seized documents and arrested three people on Tuesday morning to question them on suspicion of procurement fraud, corruption and criminal conflict of interest, according to Euractiv. “Just another normal day in the EU’s institutions,” joked Lord Frost, who was chief Brexit negotiator for the UK.
It is alleged that EU public money—or, better put, European taxpayer cash—was misused by the two services in 2021 and 2022.
Officials claim that former EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, who now leads the College of Europe, is among those who have been detained. Scottish author Tom Gallagher described this “Italian leftist” as having been a “more familiar presence in Havana and Tehran during her tenure than in Warsaw or Kyiv,” adding:
The elevation of a Eurocommunist helps to explain why the EU has disgraced itself through incompetence and vacillation all through the Ukraine war.
Others have highlighted that Mogherini hailed the EU as Ukraine’s “strongest supporter” even before Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
Investigators have been especially focussed on the college’s €3.2 million purchase of a building in Bruges, used to house diplomats attending the academy. It appears as though none of the officials currently under scrutiny have accepted requests to comment on the situation.
Zoltán Kovács, who is spokesman for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, said it is “funny how Brussels lectures everyone on [the] ‘rule of law’ while its own institutions look more like a crime series than a functioning union.”
Indeed, this probe follows a handful of recent others, including into the European Parliament’s so-called ‘Qatargate’ corruption scandal.
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
