Overnights in luxury hotels, transatlantic flights, tickets for football matches: German MEPs receive many gifts on their travels. At the same time, many violate the obligations to publish the relevant data, according to an investigation by the German News Agency (dpa). In the midst of the European Parliament corruption scandal, the gifts in question – which are allowed, to be noted – are increasingly in the spotlight.

dpa asked all MEPs of the German parties represented in the Bundestag whether they had made public the gifts they received during the current legislative period, in accordance with the provisions of the European Parliament’s rules of procedure.

The measures in favor of transparency

According to parliamentary rules, MPs must report and publicize travel paid for by third parties and gifts received in the course of their duties by the end of next month at the latest. Everything is recorded in a register, which everyone has access to. However, there are exceptions, which are often difficult to understand, even for the MPs themselves. For example, many MEPs report that it is currently being considered whether the vehicles provided to them for security reasons by local authorities during the Parliament’s mission to Ukraine should be declared.

What gifts do MPs receive?

The list is long: according to the data, Katarina Barley, one of the vice-presidents of the European Parliament, had accepted in 2021 to have her expenses covered for two nights in luxury hotels, Villa Kennedy in Frankfurt and Le Meridién in Hamburg, but and for a football match at the Cologne stadium in October 2021. Asked about this, Barley said she had declared “a total of 13 trips – regardless of whether they were part of the declaration obligation or not”.

CDU’s Lena DuPont includes, among other things, a three-night stay at the Imperial Hotel New Delhi, which bills itself as the best five-star hotel in the financial center of New Delhi, as part of the mission of the Indo-German Women’s Leadership Initiative. With a delay of two weeks, Lena DuPont had declared three nights at the Royal Beach Hotel in Tel Aviv, which were covered by an organization promoting German-Israeli relations.

Andreas Schwab, her colleague from the Christian Democratic party CDU, was covered for two nights at the same hotel, as well as a business class flight to New York. He points out that all these trips were made in the context of information on specific legislative initiatives. Bernhard Chimniok of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party also records two all-expenses-paid nights at a luxury hotel in India in 2019.

The Green Party politician Reinhard Butikofer made the most paid trips. He released them all in a timely manner, usually a few days after they were completed. The relevant documents show that the Australian government paid Butikofer for, among other things, five business-class flights and seven nights’ accommodation as part of an “Individual Special Visitor Program”, where, according to him, the MP had almost daily meetings with representatives of universities, governments and businesses.

About one in five MPs do not answer the questions

dpa contacted a total of 85 MPs, of which 69 responded in time, i.e. around 80%. The Liberal Party (FDP) and the Party of the Left (Die Linke), with five MPs each, were the only parties to respond in their entirety. Two of the 16 SPD MPs and two of the 21 Green MPs did not respond. The lowest response rate, in absolute numbers, was recorded in the CDU, where 8 out of 29 MEPs did not respond. Proportionately, AfD politicians were the most non-responders (4 out of 9).

Failure to meet the deadline

Of the more than 30 MPs who disclosed trips or gifts, only 10 met all the prescribed deadlines, while 14 disclosed them only after the dpa investigation, even though they could have declared them earlier. In their defense, the deputies state that they missed the deadlines by mistake or ignorance.

Rafael Kergueno of the organization “Transparency International” judges that “MPs do not take the obligation to declare seriously”, since “there is a culture of impunity”.

What’s next for MEPs?Probably nothing special. Decisions on possible penalties are taken by the President of the Parliament, Roberta Metzola, who has also recently come under fire. And that’s because she had delayed registering an overnight stay with her husband in a luxury French hotel, the expenses of which were covered by a group of winemakers. So far there has been no talk of sanctions.