The European Parliament is postponing making a call on whether to ask a far-right group to pay back €4 million until the EU’s prosecutor concludes its investigation into the group’s alleged mismanagement of funds.
The Parliament’s Bureau, composed of President Roberta Metsola and the 14 vice presidents, will on Monday evening rubber-stamp the recommendation from the Parliament’s secretary-general to delay closing the 2024 accounts of the now-defunct Identity and Democracy group, according to a note seen by POLITICO.
The Parliament’s administration found irregularities in public procurement and donations to the ID group — former home to France’s Marine Le Pen, Austria’s Herbert Kickl and Italy’s Matteo Salvini — to the tune of €4.3 million between 2019 and 2024, after which the European Public Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation into the matter, as reported by POLITICO.
What makes the affair complicated is that the ID group dissolved after last year’s EU election, with a majority of its members and staff absorbed into the new Patriots for Europe group. While the Parliament’s budgetary control committee considers the two groups to be related — and therefore, the Patriots potentially liable to pay back the cash — the Patriots have pushed back, arguing that they are two separate legal entities.
“The absurd claim that the Patriots are the legal successors to the ID group is baseless,” Patriots MEP Tamás Deutsch said in September, after the budgetary control committee instructed the secretary-general to look into recovering the allegedly misspent funds.
The secretary-general should “assess the potential liabilities of the responsible [lawmakers] and hierarchy for intentional or gross-negligent authorization of irregular expenditure,” the committee said in a letter addressed to Metsola.
A spokesperson for EPPO declined to give a timeline for the results of its probe. “The investigation is ongoing and will take as long as necessary to examine all relevant elements, both incriminating and exculpatory,” they said.
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