Commission releases travel costs for first two months of 2016 but says revealing more would create ‘excessive burden’
The European commission has been criticised for releasing a limited number of its most senior officials’ travel expenses three years after requests for full transparency were first made.
According to the disclosure covering two months of travel costs last year, a mission in the name of Federica Mogherini, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, was the most expensive trip. It cost €77,118 for her and aides to travel by air taxi – a privately chartered plane – to summits in Azerbaijan and Armenia between 29 February to 2 March 2016.
A two-day visit by the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, with a delegation of eight other people to see Italy’s political leaders in Rome in February 2016 cost €27,000, again due to the chartering of a private plane.
Mina Andreeva, a commission spokeswoman, said the use of air taxis was only allowed where commercial flights were either not available or their flight plans did not fit in with a commissioner’s agenda. Security concerns would also allow the chartering of a private plane under commission rules.
She said of Juncker’s trip that there had been “no available commercial plane to fit the president’s agenda” in Italy, where he met the Italian president and prime minister, among other dignitaries.
Helen Darbishire, founder and director of Access Info Europe, which sought the travel costs, said the organisation was disappointed that three years after seeking disclosure, the number of travel reports was so limited.
She said: “Initially [the commission] only released the general totals. Later we received data in which the names of the European commissioners and the travel dates were blacked out. By then, requesting each commissioner’s data separately, we could obtain more information. For example, at the end of 2016 we received the cost notes of six commissioners from a two-month period in 2015.”
In 2017, Access Info Europe launched a public campaign calling on European citizens to request the commission’s travel expenses via an online form. That resulted in the release of documents for January and February 2016.
According to the commission, disclosing the travel expenses for the other 10 months of 2016 would create an “excessive administrative burden”.
Speaking to reporters in Brussels, Andreeva, the commission spokeswoman, added: “I think we do publish information on expenses whenever we are asked to provide information … I think it is not possible on a case-by-case basis to publish all expenses of people travelling.”
According to documents relating to the two months in 2016, total travels costs for visits by commissioners to European parliament sessions in Strasbourg, the World Economic Forum in Davos and official visits to countries came to €492.249, an average of €8,790 per month per commissioner.
They stayed abroad 467 times in the period, amounting to eight nights per person per month. The most travelled was the German commissioner for the budget, Günther Oettinger. During 13 missions to six European countries, he spent 35 nights abroad in the two-month period.
An analysis of the 261 missions showed that the European commission was generally careful in its spending, with hotel costs regularly coming to less than €200 a night. The most expensive overnight stay was in Addis Ababa and cost €629.
Darbishire said she was raising the disclosure issue with the European ombudsman for good administration. “We hope the ombudsman will launch a debate about what expenses the European commission should make public”, she told the Belgian newspaper Knack, with whom her NGO worked on the project.
“Not only in response to specific applications, but on their own initiative. Because that is normal in modern democracy.”
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