EU whistleblower in £130m case is fired

[seemslikeadream]

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Brussels
(Filed: 14/10/2004)

...

Marta Andreasen, the former chief accountant, was dismissed without pay following a 28-month inquiry after she spoke out against the European Union's "Enron-style" book-keeping.

...


Mrs Andreasen was suspended from her £85,000 job in May 2002 for breaking "hierarchy lines". She contacted the Court of Auditors and Euro-MPs after superiors ignored her warnings, later telling the press that the EU's £63 billion budget was "an open till waiting to be robbed".

A leaked memo to Mr Kinnock from the EU's senior auditor said her claims were "factually and substantively correct" and her suspension "would be a serious blow to reform, sending a signal that the old ways of keeping things from happening still work".

The heart of Mrs Andreasen's complaint is that the commission lacks "double-entry" book-keeping, now routine in the private sector, allegedly making it possible to divert large sums of money without leaving an electronic fingerprint. She found a £130 million discrepancy between two sets of books for 2001. This has never been fully explained.

more
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/14/wec14.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/14/ixworld.html

[AP]

1. Problems in 2001? Blame Italy and Spain. I bet their conservative govt's

are to blame (for Spain, their former gov't, since the new one is liberal).

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. The EU problems are the fault of the whole EU bureaucracy

not national governments. The problem is that the EU Commission is more or less independent - it's very difficult for anyone to hold it to account.