00:00The latest corruption scandal in European Parliament, this time related to Chinese tech
00:07giant Huawei, shows that the EU's current ethics system is not fit for the job, according
00:13to EU policy expert Alberto Alemano.
00:15The Parliament did propose a 14-point action plan two years ago in the wake of a cash-for-influence
00:22scandal, but the results are lacking.
00:25Their enforcement is really much in the hands of the president of the European Parliament
00:30or any other European institution, which basically means that there is a self-policing system
00:36in which political parties check one another in a way which is not independent.
00:40So by design, the system is not working and is designed not to work.
00:48According to Alemano, sitting and former MEPs are still able to sell their influence.
00:53Third-country lobbying is also a grey area.
00:56This is because the big political parties are not committed to strict rules on the establishment
01:02of an independent ethics body.
01:04However, the EU's image as a whole is not ruined, he claims.
01:10It's very easy to qualify the European Union as a whole as a very corrupt organization.
01:18But in reality, even these scandals prove the opposite.
01:21It is not the European Union per se to be a corrupt institution, but the members or
01:27some of the members or very few members of the European Parliament, which is one of the
01:31institutions, have been lending themselves to a possible attempt of corruption.
01:37On Thursday, Belgian investigators searched Holmes and Huawei headquarters.
01:42They suspect that the Chinese company paid bribes to MEPs in order to influence legislation
01:48in the European Parliament.
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