From fraud to nepotism to revolving doors between the public sector and industry, the stench of impunity is pervasive.
In the swish hotel conference rooms and cafés of the Brussels EU quarter, the indignation was palpable: Why had poor Henrik been singled out?
Henrik Hololei, a gregarious Estonian who had reached the heights of director-general in the EU’s civil service, had been caught accepting freebies from the government of Qatar while his department was negotiating a lucrative aviation deal ― with, ever so coincidentally, Qatar.
It was fine, the European Commission said when the matter came to light in 2023: All his free flights had been signed off by a senior person in the department. Trouble was, the senior person in the department was Hololei.
It caused a bit of stink in Brussels at the time, but chances are that in Europe at large, few people ever heard of it.
And that ― as well as the Commission’s muted response, the remarkable conclusion that no EU rules were broken, the fact that after stepping down Hololei simply made a lateral move to a cushy senior adviser role, and the widespread nothing-to-see-here attitude of the Brussels chatterati ― is the perfect illustration of the creeping sense of impunity infecting the system.