The European Commission will meet in Emergency session tonight after a daming report on the mismanagement of its services. The report condemned the Commission as a dysfunctional organisation, fostering a climate of mismanagement and incompetence.
An inquiry into allegations of widespread fraud, cronyism and nepotism singles out French Commissioner Edith Cresson as keeping quiet about gross failures in a youth training programme from which vast sums went missing, even though she was in full possession of the facts. The independent report also condemns the Commission's own security office as operating like a state within a state with Commission President Jacques Santer taking no meaningful interest in its efficiency.
The leader of the Liberal group in the European Parliament, Pat Cox, says that the report is so bad that, if the Commissioners do not do the honourable thing and resign, then his group will put down a motion to sack them.
Five officials have spent six weeks investigating the activities of eleven of the twenty Commissioners. Commissioner Edith Cresson who has been at the centre of allegations, is adamant that she will not quit.
Mr. Cox, who pushed for the enquiry, says that if the report bears out any of the claims made against her, Commission President Jacques Santer will have to act. "I think Mrs Cresson in the first instance has a choice", he said. "If she fails to exercise that choice, then I think it is up to Jacques Santer to act in a presidential way to, in effect, save his commission".
Two months ago, the European Parliament stopped short of voting to sack Jacques Santer and his nineteen fellow Commissioners only when it agreed that alleged Commission mismanagement would be investigated. Five outside experts have been leading the investigation over the past six weeks.
They interviewed eleven of the twenty Commissioners. This afternoon they will present their initial findings to the Commission President and to senior members of the European Parliament. Research Commissioner and former French Prime Minister, Edith Cresson, is under most pressure. The dentist from her home village received a Brussels contract in dubious circumstances. Her management of the education programme Leonardo also came in for scrutiny.
The Commission President, Jacques Santer, has promised he will sack any commissioner found guilty of wrongdoing. If the MEPs are not satisfied with Mr Santer's response they have threatened to fire all twenty Commissioners. In the autumn the MEPs found themselves in the spotlight over their travel allowances and other benefits. Now they have the high profile of inquisitors, in the run up to the June European elections.
The controversy could rumble on for several weeks. Some of the leading MEPs have warned that if they are dissatisfied with President Santer's response they will move to sack the commission at next month's plenary session of the Parliament.
