Euro12: European Council defies Ombudsman over rigging of EU's Fiscal Pact

The European Ombudsman has strongly condemned the European Council for unscrupulously rigging the Irish referendum and parliamentary votes around the EU on the Fiscal Compact that controls the European economy. By withholding crucial documents, the European Council has deceived both the public and parliaments in Member States who passed the Pact as law. The Fiscal Compact is in reality an undemocratic Con-Trick. It violates basic principles of national and European democracy and law.

• How can parliaments judge whether the Pact is fair, if the European Council hides the facts?
• How can a referendum decide, if the European Council rigs the evidence?
• How can the public interrogate their parliamentary representatives if the flawed legal basis for taxation and expenditure is locked away in the Council’s safe?
• Can European institutions such as the Community’s civil service be exploited as a skivvy for the politicians’ own non-Community Pact?
• The euro violates rules for a Community monetary system. Dishonest book-keeping and fraud reduced the Euro’s real value by 75 percent. Politicians refused to follow the Founding Fathers’ supranational economic and monetary principles.

The Pact makes Council the supervisor of fraud! After the Ombudsman condemned the European Council’s maladministration, the same document was requested AGAIN. The European Council again defied the Ombudsman. It refused to provide the document. A further appeal was made to the Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, that the European Council should respect her judgements and basic democratic principles.  The Ombudsman metaphorically threw up her hands. She confessed that the Ombudsman could do nothing to make the European Council follow the rules except the European Court of Justice.

She replied to me on 26 August 2014 that

‘I believe that a new inquiry into the Council’s recent refusal of disclosure would be repetitive, since there is no new element that would distinguish the new case of the one which I already inquired into. Moreover, the follow-up mentioned above (where the European Council again reiterated its own position) shows that the Council has no intention to change its position in this regard. It follows that a new inquiry into the same matters would, in all likelihood, lead to a new critical remark, which would neither be helpful to you, nor would trigger any positive follow-up from the Council.’

What is this crucial document? The European Council produced an analysis on the Pact’s flaws in terms of EU law. For European citizens it covered whether within the Pact they could take the Council and Commission to Court for abuse and criminality associated with it. That is a fundamental democratic right of all citizens. This key analysis is vital for understanding the basis on which the European Council is attempting to control the lives of 500 million citizens and multiple trillions of euros.

The document analyzing the insecure legal basis of the Fiscal Pact was circulated secretively to some EU delegations. It was never rendered public, in spite of national parliamentary debates and a referendum. Yet it is crucial for Europeans to protect the nascent European democracy that has been so abused by the European Council fraud in the past.

In this Pact the European Council gave itself unprecedented powers over national budgets and imposed controls and reviews on government spending. The measures were forced through national Parliaments. Some national leaders refused to sign up to the Fiscal Pact. Thus the Pact cannot be regarded as EU or Community law. At best it is an international agreement masquerading as European law. Obfuscation.

The Fiscal Pact measures are so radical and further distort the Community method for European democracy that referendums in all Member States should have been mandatory. Only one country, however, was able to force a referendum about this measure. That was Ireland. Its constitution requires such matters with major democratic consequences be subject to a vote. Other Member States railroaded the measure through their parliamentary system. A bare majority sufficed. There was minimal or no public debate about it. In Cyprus, which was hit by a euro banking disaster that shook the rickety foundations of the euro, it was passed simply by governmental Decree thus bypassing parliament.

The European Council’s imposition of the Fiscal Compact bypassed all the usual democratic control of the European system such as the European Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee and proper public debate. The European Council has consistently blocked the legally required elections for these bodies. In this case they just ignored them.

Are the Pact’s measures legal? Have Europeans lost their democratic rights? The Court has yet to pronounce.

Robert Schuman, the initiator of the European Community, defined democracy by the goals the European peoples define for themselves, not politicians. He said that all measures must be ‘in the service of Europeans and acting in agreement with the European peoples.‘ In this Pact, the people were left out of the loop in one of the most important measures in recent European history.

A key issue of this Pact is whether Europeans will be able to take legal action against politicians’ abuse or criminality spawned by these ‘closed door’ measures. Were the people consulted? No. Did they call for it? No. Did they agree? Hardly.

The European Council is acting to prevent democratic control of its new powers. Specifically it has thumbed its nose at the Ombudsman in refusing to release documents of primary interest. It did the same to the citizen who pay their salaries and the cost of the legal document in question.

Who are these people who are refusing democratic control over taxpayers money?

The Fiscal Compact was brought in because of corruption of politicians who not only overspent their countries’ budget, but used national budgets in voter bribes to sections of the public while giving ‘tax breaks’ to party supporters. Then they cooked the books. The national statistics were bent, twisted and contorted to cover the fraudulent activity.

If this had happened in a commercial company the perpetrators would now be in prison.

But they are politicians. Now they have a Pact that puts them in the judge’s seat.

Euro11: Ombudsman condemns European Council cover-up on legality of euro's Fiscal Compact

Maladministration on a grand scale! Who controls multi-billion funds that dwarf the EU’s annual budget by three or four times? Who ultimately controls the multi-trillion stranglehold that the Brussels institutions have on the budgets of national governments in the EU?  Who controls the Bank? Why are such mega projects excluded from Court action for fraud and crimes that the euro crises have already exposed across the whole euro zone?

If you thought some fiddling by MEPs or even small States like Greece, Portugal, Cyprus or Ireland was of concern, take a stiff coffee before reading on.

The European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, has condemned the European Council and its secretariat in the Council of Ministers of maladministration for a cover-up and refusal to provide promptly legal information for public discussion on the  Fiscal Compact Treaty controlling Europe’s multi-trillion euro economy. The documents, essential for a proper democratic debate and consultation were requested two years ago in January 2012.

In spite of the Ombudsman’s ruling, the documents in question have still not been provided.

The Fiscal Compact is an international treaty and has not been signed by two Member States. Both the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom refused. Its relationship to the EU justice system is therefore questionable. For the European Court to act all Member States must have the measures agreed by democratic vote in a European treaty of all Member States. Then all the European institutions have their right to discuss and amend the treaty. The Council, Parliament, Consultative Committees all elected by democratic vote have to have their imput and rights on individual decisions and measures undertaken. The Commission should have clear independence. It should not be treated like a skivvy or slave of the Council of Ministers. It is not their Secretariat! Then the European Court of the EU can make its judgements when their is a complaint from any citizen, organization or State.

Signatories of an international treaty conversely, for example, NATO or the Council of Europe, cannot ask the European Union’s Court of Justice in Luxembourg to make judgements for them.

So what is the status of the Fiscal Compact?

It spends nearly half of its many pages with a Preamble with many indents or tear-jerking appeals of its Europeanness: Conscious of this, Desiring that, Recalling this that and the other of European goals and even institutions. The truth is it is not a part of the European Union or the Community. It is a separate international treaty, fixed up by some politicians in a fix. They have used all the lawyers’ skills and deceits to give a facade that it is part of the European legal system, as best they can. But they can’t. There are two members missing and only treaties inside the Community system embracing all members are EU legal treaties.

How can outraged European citizens or duped Member States appeal if other States do not comply with the Compact’s strictures? What can anyone do if some politicians treat the other States as financial patsies? That is just what the monetary crises in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland and others are all about. The public’s conclusion is obvious. Some politicians are not honest, nor do they act honestly with the people’s money. Money deranges their judgement. They treat it as a slush fund to dole out to people they hope will vote for them. If they can’t get away with it at home or run out of money they tap into the prosperous countries that keep their books in order and have a surplus.

The full title of the Fiscal Compact is Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union. It tries to add additional bandages on the badly conceived and crisis-ridden Euro project.

The euro was made by politicians for politicians, hoping they would get away on a European scale with overspending and hidden financing they had all been doing since the 1970s. Then surprise, surprise, the public found out that the politicians cooked the books, not only in Greece but practically everywhere. In a commercial company that sort of duplicity and malpractice would have been considered criminal. But politicians say it is normal for them. They are only dealing with public money!

No wonder that the politicians’ main scam, the Euro, has experienced only 7 or 8 years of stability and convergent national bond interest rates.  That is a blink of an eye in the lifetime of a solid, stable currency. Why did interest rates explode again? It does not have solid monetary or democratic foundations.

The euro’s worth has fallen to a quarter or  fifth of what its value should be worth against stable stores of value. Its conception and management by the secretive EuroGroup, which is not an institution of the EU, flies in the face of any real Community democracy. A Community currency requires Community democratic control.

The other bandages that the Council politicians concocted in the privacy of their meetings, the European Stability Mechanism and the European Finance and Stability Facility with half a trillion euro and its Mechanism that leverages a few more billion from the EU budget. This created a company in Luxembourg to draw billions of loans and liabilities from international financial markets. Who is this money for? Why, the same States that are already seen as betraying the public’s trust in cooking the statistics and overspending their budgets. In other words the taxpayers will have to pay for any mismanagement in these operations too.

And what do we find in these treaties? Surprise, suprise! We find an assurance by the same politicians that anyone involved in these multi-billion operations, when seen to be obviously guilty of malpractice, is offered total legal immunity from prosecution!

Not only that no document will be available for public scrutiny. No document will be able to be controlled and judged by any court of law whatsoever! This is what the relevant article of the ESM says about its staff and their paper trail:

“ARTICLE 35
Immunities of persons
1. In the interest of the ESM, the Chairperson of the Board of Governors, Governors, alternate Governors, Directors, alternate Directors, as well as the Managing Director and other staff members shall be immune from legal proceedings with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity and shall enjoy inviolability in respect of their official papers and documents. ”

Who are the governors? Why, the politicians! That is a paradise for crooks and crooked practice. It is an invitation to mega crisis.

The Background with my last commentary on this case can be found at Euro10.
The Ombudsman’s judgement on the Fiscal Compact cover-up can be found at
http://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/cases/decision.faces/en/53191/html.bookmark