Luxury-Loving Eurocrats

Ending an expense account binge

When Roy Jenkins was Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer a decade ago, he boasted about his record of bringing "public expenditure under very sharp control." He has been less successful in his tenure as president of the European Commission, a job he has held for the past 2 1/2 years. During his stewardship in the European Community's top administrative post, a recent audit has revealed, many of the E.C.'s 13 commissioners went on an expense account binge that was anything but controlled.

The 50-page audit, which was prepared by the European Court of Auditors and promptly leaked to the West German weekly Stern, disclosed that the commissioners, who administer the E.C., had run up expenses that cost taxpayers from the nine Common Market nations a total of $1.4 million last year. In addition the commissioners were paid $2.1 million in salaries and allowances. The auditors turned up such items as Jenkins' $3,842 bill for liquor consumed in his Brussels office, Danish Commissioner Finn Olav Gundelach's $126,993 transportation tab, and West German Commissioner Wilhelm Haferkamp's $39,976 entertainment claim. When the auditors asked Haferkamp for guest lists of his lavish lunches at such Brussels luxury restaurants as the Ecailler du Palais Royal, he withdrew 23 of the bills, explaining that he could not remember whom he had invited.

It was Haferkamp, in fact, whose expense account artistry had provoked the European Parliament into ordering the audit earlier this year. Members of Parliament had been dismayed by reports that he had given a $14,000 cocktail party in Caracas and run up a $2,000 bill for three nights spent in New York City's Pierre hotel. Last year, he took a woman friend on a trip to Peking as an official interpreter at E.C. expense and over Budget Commissioner Christopher Tugendhat's objections. Though the woman was multilingual, she happened to speak not a word of Chinese.

The commissioners' favorite means of transport were "air taxis," or executive jets, costing more than $600,000 last year. Italy's Lorenzo Natali made so many official trips to Rome that he managed to spend 104 days of the year in the Italian capital rather than in the commission's Brussels headquarters.

Though the commissioners each receive from $20,000 to $33,000 a year for "representational" entertainment, depending on their individual ranks, in addition to their salaries of $122,000 to $145,000, they exceeded their allowances by 24%, according to the audit. Stung by the charge, Jenkins issued a denial, arguing that the auditors were wrong in calling the 24% an "overrun." The total amount spent, $376,000, he said, was still less than the $381,300 he claimed the European Parliament had allocated for entertainment by the commissioners. But Jenkins promised to publish quickly the commission's response to the audit as well as "a review of all existing practices and procedures."

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