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There is no love lost for HANS-PETER MARTIN, the MEP who single-handedly burst the bubble on Europe’s well-oiled gravy train when he taped MEPs signing in, and sodding off 
The Austrian MEP Hans-Peter Martin is not everybody’s favourite subject in Brussels. At 48, he is the embodiment of a one-man campaign against the excesses of a multi million-euro guzzling European institution, and friends in this part of Brussels are few for the vilified MEP and former Der Spiegel journalist.
The enduring image of the white-haired deputy, more akin to a school teacher with his little spectacles, is a photograph of him wrestled to the ground by a socialist MEP, one Martin caught red-handed as he taped his colleagues signing in the Brussels registry, and go home – EUR280 richer, just for signing in before catching a plane home.
The long-drawn saga has attracted international media attention. A former leader of the Austrian social democrats, Martin had accused his socialist colleagues of signing up for the daily allowances even though meetings they were supposed to be attending had been cancelled.
The German socialists’ leader Martin Schultz – victim of Silvio Berlusconi’s incongruous Nazi ‘kapo’ jibe – expelled Martin from the socialists. MEPs fought back, even former European parliament president Pat Cox reprimanding Martin. The ‘gravy train’ saga had just started.
But Martin returned to the parliament, ultimately to conduct a single-handed operation to reform the beleguered system, this time with his own list, and winning his seat again with 14 per cent of the Austrian vote, more than the Greens or the Austrian Freedom Party.
MaltaToday is currently seeking the publication of Malta’s five MEPs’ accounts, after having revealed the potential EUR100,000 in net income the MEPs can earn every year. All their expenses are covered for by the parliament. Their reimbursed flights to Brussels and Strasbourg also win them a lump sum of EUR1,000 (Lm400) every week, just for covering the distance between Malta and the parliament. They have handsome health insurance schemes and one of the most lucrative of pension schemes. So why does Brussels hide away their accounts?
The newspaper now awaits a decision from the Parliament’s bureau on Wednesday – which brings together the vice-presidents of the political groups – on whether to release our five MEPs’ accounts or not. Given that the absolute majority are socialists and EPP vice-presidents, the chances are slim. Martin is upping up the tempo, his lawyers looking in to whether he can file lawsuits on behalf of European citizens to make the documents publicly available. “I find it unacceptable that there isn’t full transparency about the finances and the wheeling and dealing of political groups.”
It is late evening at the parliament, and Martin sits at his desk in near twilight darkness, all lights switched off save for a lone reading light, almost reflective of the frugality he would like to see here at the European parliament. His assistant works silently behind us, as Martin draws on a tale – at times with much apocalyptic and paranoid gusto – of spiralling costs which leave the MEPs only happier and the European electorate, disillusioned.
He is “definitely a pro-European”, although now in his seventh year, he is becoming more sceptical of the European reality and its institutions. “There is no Gorbachev here,” he says, equating Brussels’ euro deputies and their smorgasbord of privileges with the Soviet monolith. “Even if there had been a Gorbachev inside, he would have also come too late… the similarities between the Brussels and Moscow bureaucracies are striking.”
His prediction for the future of the European project, verges eerily on the same Soviet fate. People getting fed up. Indeed, he is sure people “won’t want it anymore.” Martin looks back at a historic escalation in which the European Parliament increased MEPs’ perks on the basis of ‘common standard’ for deputies.
“Although we are moving into a life of ‘minimum standards’, here everything is about ‘maximum’ standards. You have individual MEPs from a country who have, for example an inadequate national pension system. So they looked at who has the best pension system and they would apply it to everybody. There was uneven pay… the Spaniards earning much less than the Germans. So there were the incredible lump sums for travelling long distances, and despite 9-11 and the creation of low-far airlines where you could get a ticket for peanuts, the Germans started complaining, saying ‘oh come on, now the Spaniards, because they are so far away, and they have these big allowances, they get more than we do…’ ”
On Schultz, certainly having lost no love with the German leader, Martin elucidates the example of MEPs and the EUR280 daily allowance. “So they put the daily allowance very, very high so it would also be attractive for people like Martin Shultz from Aachen, just to drop by and then take the plane to Berlin. I have watched him a couple of times going from Aachen to Brussels and then to Berlin for a meeting there, to collect the daily allowance because of the distance – that’s very interesting,” he sniggers, “some 130km.”
It was the same with the luxury health insurance system, where you could collect up to EUR120,000 per year as MEP, plus EUR30,000 for your wife, each child.
“And at the end of the day you ended up with a system where if an MEP pushes all the buttons of this system they earn more than any given head of a national government. So the Germans, who pay a third of the whole EU budget, are actually paying for a hundred chancellors, because they have Schroeder’s pay and 99 MEPs as well.”
Of course, it is absolutely lawful for MEPs to claim their daily allowance if they are physically present in Brussels, because these cover accommodation and food costs, even if there is no meeting. The problem, some claim, are the huge differences in salaries paid by national governments, which incentivise those on low salaries, including Malta’s, to supplement their incomes from the daily and lump sum travel allowances available to them. Not that the new, monthly EUR7,000 will change anything. Indeed the new reforms hardly changed much.
“In my view, it’s the opposite of a Potemkin village,” Martin says about the recent reforms. “Here we have a reasonably modest façade, and behind you still have a palace – the façade is the monthly EUR7,000 for every MEP. An Austrian MEP pays 15 per cent tax, and there are additional costs as well as a lot of travelling. I’d say EUR3,500 net income per month is justifiable for this kind of job when you do it seriously. But on top of that, we now have the pension system not on a voluntary basis but mandatory, for free for everybody. We have a very small contribution for the costs of the luxury health insurance scheme. There are no cuts on the daily allowances. The only thing they have taken off are the travel allowances which hits people who live further than 1,000km away.
“But at the end of the day they agreed to go down from around EUR15,000-EUR20,000 a month to EUR10,000-EUR15,000 a month – and the MEPs would not have gone for this decrease had there not been such a lot of noise made during the last election campaign. That still saves the taxpayer some EUR5,000 for 700 MEPs every month – around EUR40 million to EUR50 million a year… that’s actually quite impressive. It’s the result of the big media attention which has indeed won the taxpayer some money. I think there is that potential to save another EUR50 million.”
Vilified and feared, Martin is today a non-aligned MEP. His campaign is followed by the international press. But he is also the most unpopular MEP in Brussels.
“Most of them are disgusted, and I would say the majority by now openly hate me. There was a great uproar and outrage in the early days when I made my findings public in 2004. I had not planned to run again for office, but I got a stunning 14 per cent of the national vote. Ever since, there is this open hatred where people call me all sorts of words. There is a very open aggression quite often when I speak. The chairman of the budget committee I sit on ignores me, not even letting me raise questions on reports.”
Martin displays paranoid verbosity in describing the system: “it has the shape of a fortress where thousands live inside this parliament with their schemes and traditions, catering to each other.” He calls it, in the common anthropological but favourite reverberation from the Santian lexicon, the “friends of friends system”.
Part of that incestuous system, unsurprisingly are media representatives. “They are journalists sent off to Brussels, who are now living a comfortable life, who may have wanted to be chief editors on their television stations. There is no serious investigative reporting going on: maybe from colleagues who come here for two weeks, and very often they are looked upon suspiciously by their colleagues. And along with the media you have the commission, the bureaucrats, the lobbyists, and the diplomats – it’s a very closed circuit.”
The recent block on journalists from filming inside the parliament or from entering restricted areas such adds to Martin’s soviet allegory: “here MEPs behave like communist functionaries in the late Brezhnev era and before Gorbachev came. At that time many of these Moscow functionaries believed they were building up communism but unfortunately there was so much that prevented them from succeeding. And here the MEPs think they are working for the good of Europe, and that the media is just being stirred up by people like Mr Martin.”
At the end of the day, Martin wants to know how far-reaching the consequences of this highly-paid job are in fact determining of an MEP’s work and whether Europe’s deputies are really delivering to their electorates. His ominous prediction is a growing disillusionment with Europe, with European democracy experiencing lower voter turnouts than last year’s 42 per cent.
“We are talking about to what extent these opportunities have an influence on you as a responsible decision-maker: you hide what you get from your party, even from your family. Definitely from your electorate. There is hardly another job where you can so easily make such a lot of money. You do sacrifice a lot but you will end up being re-elected and put on your party list or given a job. You don’t really have to do anything if you don’t want: you just sign in and push the buttons, and through this, the system of privileges and perks contributes to an endangerment of democracy.”
Martin talks about a parliament of a minority of white sheep, and a majority of black ones who are coveting the opportunistic goldmine they have landed on. Conspiracy theorist or a solitary reformer crusading for transparency?
“It’s a real gravy train, a highly subsidised waiting room for former ministers and for who wants to be minister in their country. Quite a few have lost their struggle for power in their country, so they are sent off to Brussels. So it is a logical reaction when somebody attacks the system: I have been warned by some MEPs who tell me my best bodyguard is when I am on television. Other MEPs told me so, that there are people who would really want to get rid of me physically if they could. You have to live with it.”
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