THE EUROPEAN UNION — CESSPIT OF CORRUPTION, OR DEN OF THIEVES? First there’s this:

Jules Muis, the outspoken European Commission chief auditor, has delivered a scathing critique of the willingness of the organisation to embrace reform and to tackle fraud.

Explaining his decision to resign next April, earlier than expected, Mr Muis spoke of his struggles to get the Commission to move “from the 19th century into the 21st century”.

Romano Prodi, European Commission president, came to office in 1999 promising to create a world-class administration and to crack down on fraud. But Mr Muis, giving evidence to members of the European parliament (MEPs), gave a picture of an organisation which sometimes failed to face its problems, and which frustrated his attempts to root out wrongdoing.

The former World Bank official said he wanted to conduct a thorough inquiry into allegations of serious fraud at Eurostat, the Commission’s statistics arm, but was ordered to restrict the scope of his investigation. . . .

He said the Commission tied his hands so tightly on the Eurostat investigation that his final work would not constitute an audit. “You have a degree of very limited assurance at the end of the trip,” he told the parliament’s budgetary control committee. The Commission argues Mr Muis’s proposed work would have taken too long and would not have met the demands from MEPs for a speedy report.

Then there’s this:

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – The European Commission has come clean and admitted the huge extent of fraud in its statistical office, Eurostat.

At a hastily arranged meeting on Wednesday (9 July), administrative reform Commissioner Neil Kinnock and his monetary affairs colleague Pedro Solbes told the European Parliament that Eurostat offices had been raided the night before and all its files secured.

The Commission acted after receiving two reports on Monday providing evidence that “serious wrong-doing on a much more widespread scale than previously thought may have taken place”.

The Commission has decided to open proceedings against three Commission officials and, as a precautionary measure, a number of Eurostat managers will be moved to advisory functions.

And there’s more.

Then there’s this report:

PARIS, July 7 (AFP) – One of France’s biggest ever corruption trials ended late Monday after four months of hearings, with top executives of the formerly state-owned oil company Elf Aquitaine facing prison terms of up to eight years.

Former chief executive Loik Le Floch-Prigent, 59, his deputy Alfred Sirven, 76, and Elf’s so-called Mr Africa Andre Tarallo, 76, are alleged to have made themselves personal fortunes worth hundreds of millions of euros from illicit slush funds run by the company in the early 1990s. . . .

In the concluding stages lawyers for Le Floch-Prigent and Sirven – both of whom are already serving jail terms on related offences – admitted their guilt, but argued that it was Elf’s long-established culture of graft and easy money that led them astray.

“Elf (was a company in which) secrecy was made into a system, where corruption was no longer an offense and where the smallest unit was 10 million francs. Some resisted but many others came crashing down,” said Sirven’s attorney Pierre Haik.

“It is an enormous company that erodes your sense of reality. Everything at Elf was taken to excess,” Le Floch-Prigent told the court earlier.

Indeed. Remember all that talk about the superiority of “European-style capitalism” during the Enron scandals?