Nick Cohen
It's been said many times, but that makes it no less true - he's such a right-wing Islingtonian hack these days, isn't he?In this week's Evening Standard he notes:
IF I WERE a Romanian or Bulgarian, I would find the European Union's lectures on corruption hard to take. It's not that EU membership shouldn't be a spur for investigating the graft of Balkan politicians, civil servants and judges. But when, for 12 years in a row, the European Court of Auditors has refused to sign off the EU's accounts because they cannot account for billions of euros, anticorruption investigations appear as necessary in Brussels as Bucharest.It's certainly true that the accounts weren't signed off, and it is not a good situation. But this is right-wing hackery because his desire to attack the EU (in the guise of the Commission) has prevented him (though I doubt even his supporters would say that he puts much research into any of his work these days) from making the slightest enquiry into what 'not signing off the accounts' means. As I understand it, the nature of the Commission's position means that it unlikely they will ever be signed off in their entirety (which means they won't be signed off at all), because the Commission cannot control many of the bodies that spend the money (as they are parts of the national governments). The Commission's books, which is what we would call the accounts of a PLC, are seen by the auditors as 'reliable'.
Labels: Nick Cohen
posted by Matthew @ 1/06/2007 06:22:00 PM
Comments: 2
