Comparative corruption

Date: 17/05/03

Different standards of probity across the continent pose a problem for the European Union

THEY must rank as the most expensive nappies in history. The diapers, chocolate and scent that Mona Sahlin charged to her government credit card in Sweden in 1995 cost €70 ($80) - and a promising political career. Tipped as a future prime minister, Ms Sahlin's fortunes never recovered from the nappy affair and a subsequent revelation that she had failed to pay parking tickets.

It takes a lot more to end a political career in France or Italy. Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's prime minister, is on trial in Milan accused of trying to bribe a judge back in the 1980s. It is just one of a string of criminal cases Mr Berlusconi has had to fight off, with charges ranging from false accounting to bribery, while keeping his political career and business empire in shape. Having failed to get his most recent case transferred to a supposedly more sympathetic jurisdiction, Mr Berlusconi is now hoping to push through a law to grant immunity from criminal prosecution to Italians with “high state roles”. A similar immunity rule helped Jacques Chirac, France's president, avoid facing charges of financial crimes allegedly committed during his long stint as mayor of Paris. When Mr Chirac ran for re-election as president last year, opponents produced a fake election poster with the slogan “Vote for me or I go to jail!”

While Mr Chirac is exempt from prosecution, the trial of former executives of the French oil company, Elf-Aquitaine (as it was formerly called), now under way in Paris, is yielding some startling insights into other corners of the French establishment. Elf, it seems, operated for many years as the unofficial slush fund of the French state, paying for everything from the suborning of African dictators to the election campaigns of the main right- and left-wing parties and lavish homes for selected executives. When Lok Le Floch-Prigent, the former chief executive, was questioned about the use of Elf money to buy him a Paris house for €9m, he admitted apologetically that “things did get a bit out of hand”. As for the use of a further €4.5m of company money to fund his divorce, the former CEO suggested that this had been done at the direct suggestion of François Mitterrand, then France's president, who had been keen to ensure that Mr Le Floch-Prigent's estranged wife did not reveal any embarrassing secrets about Elf.

At least the French and Italian cases have come to trial. Not so the scandals surrounding Helmut Kohl, who used to be chancellor of Germany, and the illegal campaign contributions he marshalled for his Christian Democratic Union. There have long been allegations that some of his party's cash pile came from Elf, as a political favour from Mitterrand. But the former chancellor isn't telling. Though he has admitted that he ran a network of secret accounts stuffed with illegal campaign contributions, Mr Kohl says that honour prevents him from revealing the donors' names. His staff conveniently destroyed many potentially relevant computer files in the days before he left office.

In years gone by, revelations of corruption could be treated by people in other countries as good, dirty fun - and often as a welcome chance to confirm national stereotypes and scoff at neighbours. But in these days of deepening European political integration, different ideas about what constitutes corruption pose a real problem.

In July, Italy will start presiding over the European Union for six months - and Mr Berlusconi will become the Union's public face. The fact that he will be simultaneously on trial for corruption, even if no verdict is handed down during the Italian presidency, is causing a few winces. Even if he is innocent, the implications for the EU are not entirely reassuring, since his defence is based partly on the argument that Italy's judicial system is utterly politicised and unreliable. Hardly a reassuring portrait of a country with the fourth-biggest economy in the EU.

A sense of mistrust between EU countries is not an abstract or occasional problem. It affects their day-to-day dealings. Consider the past week's goings-on in Brussels. The Union's finance ministers were in town, trying to nail down a deal on a pan-European savings tax to combat tax evasion. But Italy is refusing to sign on the dotted line until it gets a deal on an utterly unrelated issue: it wants to spread out a fine on Italian farmers who exceeded their permitted milk-production quotas. As one exasperated Eurocrat put it: “The Italians are delaying one anti-fraud measure because they have been caught out under another.”

These problems of mutual mistrust will increase if the EU's plans for much deeper judicial and criminal integration proceed apace. In the wake of September 11th the Union approved plans for a pan-European arrest warrant which will short-circuit traditional and lengthy extradition procedures. But such a measure requires complete faith in the judiciaries of all 25 countries that will join the Union by the middle of next year, including several that have only recently emerged from the former Soviet block. Mr Berlusconi is clearly worried. He warned his colleagues, in vain, that the European arrest warrant might lead politically motivated prosecutors to pursue their quarries across frontiers.

A matter of standards

A new European constitution being drawn up in Brussels at a convention on the EU's future is likely to integrate Europe's criminal-justice systems even more tightly. A draft document produced by the convention's presidium (as its steering committee grandly calls itself) aspires to create a “European criminal-justice policy” replete with a European public prosecutor responsible for “investigating, prosecuting and bringing to judgment perpetrators of serious crimes affecting several member states”. A list of possible crimes is drawn up elsewhere in the constitution's draft. It includes terrorism, drugs-trafficking, racism and xenophobia, and corruption. But which definition of corruption will apply? The one applied to Ms Sahlin? Or the looser one preferred elsewhere in the Union?

Different standards of probity across the continent pose a problem for the EU.

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