What a shower

Despite the furore over our own MPs’ expenses, the far more staggering amounts of taxpayers’ money sprayed at EU officials largely goes unremarked upon. It may be further away than Westminster, but a considerable proportion of it is still our money.

Only thanks to France’s Court of Accounts (Les juridictions financières) have we been able to learn that the French presidency of the EU was the second most expensive ever. The six-month presidencies usually set the EU taxpayer back between 70-80 million Euros. Under President Sarkozy, however, the bill from July to December 2008 came to an astonishing 171 million Euros (c. £160 million).

There has been some disagreement in France over whether, as revealed on the French website Mediapart, a shower was really built for Sarkozy at a cost of £250,000 (with a built-in surround radio system) that he never actually used. However, what is beyond dispute is that the summit for the Union of the Mediterranean in Paris cost 16.6 million Euros (£15.5 millon). That’s right. Over £15m for a summit most of us have never heard of.

The big opening dinner for the 43 heads of state cost over 1m Euros, nigh on £1m. That’s a bill of over £23,000 per diner, the sort of l’addition that would make even a bonus-bloated Goldman Sachs banker blanch.

My French isn’t so much rusty as corroded, but I think this is the report in question. No wonder the EU’s own auditors have not felt able to sign off the accounts for the past 14 years. Next month, it will no doubt be 15 years.

It’s the same principle as we saw in our “Safe to fleece the taxpayer” blog. The more remote a politician or bureaucrat is from the voter’s cross on the ballot paper, the greater the featherbedding and corruption. Sadly, everybody seems to find the EU so unutterably tedious that it’s hard to imagine the populace of the 27 countries who are footing the bill ever holding the Eurocrats to account.