The EU Parliament delays the vote on the investigation of the climate lobby scandal ━ the European conservative

On Thursday, May 8, the leaders of the political groups in the EU Parliament should decide whether the initiative of the national conservative ECR group is progressing to create an committee of inquiry to examine the so-called Timmer goal.

According to sources within the parliament, the delay was initiated by the center-right EPP, the socialist S&D and the liberal renewal that would like to use this time in order to find the details of a special working group within the budgetary control (contom) instead of a fully autonomous examination committee.

The goal is to investigate the Dutch media months ago that the EU Commission, led by the former EU climate in the EU Commission for the Lobby Legislator, paid at least 750 million euros.

The payments were distributed over the “life” program that has a budget of € 5.4 billion and the concerns about how much more tax money could have been illegally or unethically distributed to influence the decision -making of the EU against public interest.

While EPP now claims to be on the side of the conservatives – first of all, it also tried to block each probe into the scandal, and its members also prevented a separate review of the upcoming life payments – the S&D and the renewal are not pleasant to achieve the ECR. As a compromise, they offered working group format, which contains only limited powers and a more comprehensive mandate instead of concentrating exclusively on environmental NGOs.

It is worth noting that this proposal does not correspond to the “trac” (duty of transparency and accountability) of the patriots, which managed to collect the necessary signatures at the beginning of this week. TRAC would also examine the opaque NGO financing, but its scope would also include foreign interference, systemic corruption and the lack of transparency in the EU. A vote on TRAC is not yet planned.

Examination committees are very rare, temporary parliamentary bodies with the authority to conjure up witnesses and to propose laws that were only created if there are sufficient reasons for the investigation of allegations of the grievances within the EU institutions.

This is exactly the argument that the leaders of the parliamentary groups also carry out in relation to the ECR initiative, whereby a source points out that EPP and S&D use the “need for further legal analysis” as a pretext to delay an investigation of the accusations.