Martin Jay
Graft in Brussels is as old as the hills and for decades has gone largely undetected.
For those who were hoping that the present corruption scandal in Ukraine involving Zelensky's close aides would blow over and the business of war, money laundering and gun running can resume - funded by a gullible western public - the news of the arrest of Federica Mogherini in Belgium must have come as a blow.
Mogherini was the EU's top foreign diplomat between 2014 and 2019 and was part of the so-called Iran Deal being signed in what was an auspicious occasion of international diplomacy at the time, barely a year after her taking the top job in Brussels - leaving her post in Rome as foreign minister.
In early December her house in Belgium was raided by police working on a case which would frame her for corruption charges, if sufficient evidence is collected using inside information to favour companies bidding on a tender. The case isn't expected to be huge but it is significant for many reasons. As hard as it may seem to comprehend, it would appear that it is the EU's new anti fraud unit - EPPO - which was just recently formed after years of impotency from the toothless OLAF failed to charge EU officials for graft, seems to be doing its job on investigating corruption of top EU officials. Mogherini got the cushy job of rector of the College of Europe after her 5-year term was up as the top EU diplomat under what some critics at the time commented were dodgy circumstances, given that she was clearly underqualified on the academic front to normally have such an elitist post for a college which served Europe's elite civil servants and diplomats.
Police carried out searches at the Brussels headquarters of the EU's foreign service, the European External Action Service, as well as several buildings of the College of Europe in Bruges at the request of the prosecutor's office. Searches also took place at the houses of the suspects, the prosecutor's office said while Belgian press have identified one other Italian official, the secretary general of Mogherini's former office, who is part of the suspected fraud.
However, the timing of these arrests couldn't come at a worse moment for the EU and its national leaders who are clinging onto hope for a miracle on the frontline of the Ukraine war, or even a change of heart from Donald Trump who is directing the press to write more and more about graft in Ukraine finally accepting the realities there of the sheer scale of the embezzlement of part of 400 billion dollars of cash and military equipment sent there from the U.S. alone.
The EU scandal merely underlines a peripheral point which the Europeans would have preferred remained aloof. Brussels has its own problem with corruption and so far, most Europeans don't join up the dots and link the corrupt in the Belgian capital with the massive money laundering racket which Zelensky is running with EU cash. Until now.
Graft in Brussels is as old as the hills and for decades has gone largely undetected, and even when it is, it usually gets bypassed by inept investigators. The recent case of embezzlement levelled against Ursula von der Leyen for what many suspect is siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars via a multibillion dollar vaccine deal is a good example. A posy of hopeless EU institutions have all make token efforts to bring her to account but to no avail. Before that 'Qatargate' made the headlines involving MEPs making hundreds of thousands of euros in cash bungs from both Qatar and Moroccan elites who were happy to bribe MEPs to make sure their countries' true poor human rights records would be whitewashed. A few arrests were made, but an attractive Greek MEP, who had a few hundred thousand euros of cash in her Brussels pad, managed to work out a deal with Belgian police and even keep her well paid MEP job.