RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The European Union is one of the least corrupt regions in the world,” boasts the European Commission on its website.

Oh really? Let us take a look at the EU organization itself, which — once again –- is at the center of a new corruption scandal.

Belgian police raided more than 20 locations in Belgium and Portugal in March in an investigation of alleged “active corruption within the European Parliament,” for the benefit of China’s tech giant Huawei, according to Belgium’s federal prosecutor’s office. Huawei’s main lobbying office in Brussels was raided, alongside European Parliament offices.

The Chinese company, reportedly tied to China’s Communist regime, “allegedly paid bribes to politicians to support its 5G expansion in Europe,” according to Euractiv. The investigation has apparently been underway for more than two years. It is not the first place in Europe where authorities have investigated offices and politicians linked to Huawei. In February last year, French authorities raided Huawei’s offices in France over alleged accusations of corruption and influence-peddling.

While Huawei has been effectively banned in the US – and has closed all its official and direct lobbying operations in Washington in early 2024 – the company has been free to do its influence peddling in the EU, where it is not banned. China’s influence in Europe in a multitude of areas is already highly present, having influenced or co-opted elites all over Europe, according to an October 2021 report by the Strategic Research Institute of France’s renowned Military College:

“The Chinese Communist Party has always forged links with politicians from countries whose positions, or at least, whose representations of China, they wished to influence. These practices were also part of the Soviet repertoire of active measures and are among United Front activities.”

The recent corruption is all the more remarkable as a top EU official in the European Commission – the unelected executive body of the EU – has unequivocally warned the EU against Chinese influence-peddling. Politico reported in May 2023:

“Beijing has long aimed propaganda at the European Union, seeking to undermine transatlantic unity and promote Beijing’s outlook on world affairs, said Ivana Karásková, a Czech academic and foreign influence specialist who’s advising European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová.

“Asked what parts of the Continent were most in the dark about Chinese influence, she added: ‘The whole of Western Europe is not looking. And yet there are cases that are so blatant.'”

The Belgian raid came roughly two years after the so-called Qatargate: In December 2022, Belgian authorities uncovered the bribery of Members of European Parliament by Qatar – and to some extent Morocco and Mauritania – when they raided 20 addresses in Belgium and Italy, and found €1.5 million cash in suitcases and elsewhere, leading to the arrest of several senior EU officials: Eva Kaili, who was then-vice president of the European Parliament from Greece, and Antonio Panzeri, a former Italian member of the European Parliament who, ironically, heads an NGO by the name Fight Impunity, as well as Niccolò Figà-Talamanca, head of the NGO No Peace Without Justice.

Qatar, it turned out, had been bribing these officials to influence EU legislation and policies in its favor by manipulating decisions in the European Parliament. Panzeri had been receiving bribes from Qatar since 2019 and admitted that he had been pursuing visa-free travel for Qataris in Europe, while Panzeri reportedly received €200,000 from Mauritania’s then President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz to improve the poor image of the country, where slavery is still deeply entrenched.

This is how European Parliament Vice President Eva Kaili lied for Qatar in exchange for the millions in cash to boost the country’s image in the face of criticism over letting it host the 2022 FIFA World Cup: “I alone said that Qatar is a front-runner in labor rights, abolishing kafala, introducing minimum wage.”

Politico reported on the leaked files, dubbed “the Qatargate files” in December 2023:

“The actions recorded in the documents include some with a significant impact on the workings of the European Union — such as scheming to kill off six parliamentary resolutions condemning Qatar’s human rights record, and working to deliver a visa-free travel deal between Doha and the EU.

“But the operations could also be petty… every copy of an unflattering book on Qatar that could be found within the Parliament had been diligently ‘destroyed’….

“[M]ore than 300 pieces of work for which the suspects received handsome fees. They allegedly achieved their ends using a network of associates working inside the Parliament, whom they called their ‘soldiers,’ according to the files.”

Qatargate is far from over. Trials are only scheduled to begin in late 2025. The EU, therefore, currently has not just one, but two huge corruption scandals on its hands.

The rot goes straight to the top. The president of the unelected European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in her second term in the position, having first maneuvered her way into this post after serving as a scandal-ridden minister of defense in Germany for many years, is herself under scrutiny in what has become known as “Pfizer-gate”:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, von der Leyen personally negotiated a €20 billion deal with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, paid for with EU taxpayer money, for 1.8 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses. She did this in a rather irregular way, via text messages, but refused to subject these text messages either to parliamentary or public scrutiny, and later claimed they had been lost.

Alexander Fanta, a New York Times reporter to whom the European Commission refused access to the text messages, wrote:

“As an investigative reporter, I filed an access request under the EU’s freedom of information law to the messages shared between von der Leyen and Bourla. These messages, if we had them, might provide important insights into how the controversial life-saving vaccines deal came together. They might also help to answer questions such as why the EU became Pfizer’s single biggest customer but reportedly paid a much steeper price for this batch of vaccines compared with the first tranche of Covid shots it had bought.

“There is a bigger principle at stake here, too: EU citizens have a right to know what was being negotiated on their behalf during a public health emergency. Did the contract involve too many doses of the vaccine bought at a fixed price, with no scope for a review as the pandemic developed? Did millions of expensive jabs go to waste because of the terms that Bourla secured from a panic-buying Von der Leyen?

“But the commission refused the request to share the messages, claiming that the texts were ‘by [their] nature short-lived’ and were not covered by the EU’s freedom of information law. The commission’s secrecy around its communications is so fiercely guarded that it is now defending its refusal to make the texts available in the EU court.”

According to Politico, investigators from the European Public Prosecutor’s Office are investigating von der Leyen over “interference in public functions, destruction of SMS, corruption and conflict of interest.” One European judge called the European Commission’s secrecy “bizarre.”

These are just the cases of corruption we have heard about.

The corruption, obviously, is apparently not limited to the undemocratic institutions of the EU. Large parts of Europe’s elites, including political, academic, media and others, have reportedly also been “bought” by state actors such as China and Qatar. According to Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg — authors of Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World — China “grooms” elites to do its bidding, especially in places such as the UK (albeit no longer a member of the EU following Brexit) where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used the networking group the “48 Group Club” to influence elites, including former government ministers, former British ambassadors to China, leading business people, directors of large cultural institutions and professors:

“No group in Britain enjoys more intimacy and trust with the CCP leadership than the 48 Group Club… [It] has built itself into the most powerful instrument of Beijing’s influence and intelligence gathering in the United Kingdom. Reaching into the highest ranks of Britain’s political, business, media and university elites, the club plays a decisive role in shaping British attitudes to China… enthusiastically fostering the interests of the CCP in the United Kingdom.”

Qatar has not only bought and invested in large swathes of European real estate, it is also a huge contributing factor to the Islamization of Europe. Qatar funneled — at an extremely conservative estimate — at least €71 million (approximately $78 million) to build 140 mosques and Islamic centers in Europe just as of 2014, according to the latest authoritative report on the issue, the 2019 book Qatar Papers by French journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot. More than a decade later, that figure is likely to be far higher. How much have European politicians, who do not cease to pander to Islam, received in briberies from Qatar? Are we ever likely to find out?