With Europe increasingly distracted by the ongoing war in Ukraine and fears of a new banking crisis, the latest corruption scandal to engulf the continent’s so-called ‘European Union’ (EU) has conveniently dropped lower down the news headlines. Dubbed ‘Qatargate,’ the scandal involves allegations that a vice president of the European Parliament and other EU lawmakers have been bribed by the governments of Qatar, Morocco, Mauritania, and possibly other countries, in return for influencing the Brussels-based political construct. Following police raids, arrests, and the seizure of cash, computers, and mobile phones from suspects, some observers are already asking whether the scandal could even signal the end of the EU. Deeply damaged as a result of repeated ignominies over the past couple of decades, Qatargate comes hot on the heels of Brexit and our international exposure of the EU’s Nazi roots.
The early arrests in the Qatargate scandal took place in December 2022 and saw European Parliament vice president Eva Kaili, Antonio Panzeri (a retired EU lawmaker from Italy) and others detained as part of the investigation. Panzeri subsequently admitted to being the scheme’s ringleader and agreed to a plea deal whereby, in return for a shorter prison sentence, he would reveal the identities of those he bribed and conspired with. A further EU lawmaker, Marc Tarabella from Belgium, was later arrested in February 2023, while Andrea Cozzolino, an EU lawmaker from Italy, is currently under house arrest in Naples fighting extradition to Brussels. Some reports suggest that as many as 60 additional lawmakers could ultimately be dragged into the investigation.
While Qatargate is already predicted to go down in history as the largest ever scandal in European politics, it is hardly the first one to inflict major damage on the EU’s credibility. In 1999, for example, all 20 members of the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, were forced to resign after a whistle-blower report revealed widespread fraud, nepotism, and serious management failings. Far from being the harbinger of change, however, the incident was simply a taste of what was later to come.
The Galvin Report, named after Robert Galvin, the EU’s internal audit official who authored it, was written at the end of 2006 as an audit of the expenses and allowances claimed by a sample of more than 160 lawmakers. Revealing shocking abuses, the report’s existence was deliberately covered up until February 2008 when news of it was leaked by Chris Davies, an EU lawmaker from the UK. Even then, its contents remained secret and only a select group of lawmakers were allowed to read it in a locked and guarded room. Had it not been published by WikiLeaks in 2009, the report would likely still be secret today.
Secrecy and non-transparency are the norm in EU institutions, which habitually endeavor to hide the truth from their citizens. In fact, a leaked European Commission internal memo from 2009 actively encourages officials to conceal information from public scrutiny. The memo, issued by the Commission’s trade department, tells officials they can evade European freedom of information laws by making two sets of documents, a neutral one for public release and a classified version for internal use only.
Even Eurojust, the EU’s anti-crime agency, has been involved in corruption scandals. In December 2009, the head of Eurojust, Jose da Mota, resigned after he was suspended for 30 days for having put pressure on Portuguese prosecutors to stop a corruption probe involving Portuguese prime minister Jose Sócrates. No stranger to scandal himself, Sócrates was later arrested on charges of money laundering and other crimes.
As deeply damaging to the EU as these repeated corruption scandals are, the growing awareness of the construct’s historical roots in Nazi Germany threatens not just its political credibility but also its very existence. In our book The Nazi Roots of the ‘Brussels EU’ we describe how the key architects of the European Union were recruited from among the same technocrats who had previously designed the plans for a post-WWII Europe under the control of the Nazis. Since its publication in 2010, the book has received media attention in countries including the Netherlands, Romania, the UK, and the USA.
In May 2016, one month prior to the UK’s Brexit referendum, UK lawmaker Boris Johnson described in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper how, in trying to create a powerful European superstate, the EU is “pursuing a similar goal to Hitler.” The validity of his statement was openly supported by many of his parliamentary colleagues. Significantly, therefore, only a few days prior to this, Johnson and other UK lawmakers had been sent copies of our book.
As the book and its supporting documentation definitively prove, the Nazi blueprint for the structure and function of the EU was drawn up in 1941, two years after the outbreak of WWII. In Dresden, Germany, at that time, there existed a little-known Nazi research institute that was headed by a man called Arno Sölter. In 1941, Sölter summarized the Nazi plans for postwar Europe in a book titled ‘The Greater Sphere Cartel – An Instrument of Industrial Market Order in a New Europe.’ The book describes all the key elements we see around us in the EU today, such as the unelected European Commission that serves as the construct’s executive body and the system of ‘Directives’ that are used for its lawmaking.
But that is not all. The first president and chief architect of the EU was Walter Hallstein, a German lawyer. A member of official Nazi organizations, before and during WWII Hallstein was a key architect of the New World Order via which the Nazis and the IG Farben industrial cartel had hoped to rule Europe and eventually the world.
We know this from the fact that, in May 1938, Hitler met with Mussolini in Rome, Italy, to plan their global military conquest and design the post-WWII world. One month later, in June 1938, Walter Hallstein visited Rome as part of the official Nazi State delegation that finalized the legal framework of the intended New World Order. On January 23, 1939, he revealed these plans in a public speech given in Rostock, Germany.
Less than two decades later, on March 25, 1957, Hallstein was in Rome again and became one of only 12 signatories of the ‘Treaties of Rome’ – the founding documents of the EU. Subsequently, between 1958 and 1967, he went on to hold the post of founding president of the European Commission and began to implement the Nazi blueprint for Europe.
One thing therefore seems certain in that if Qatargate itself doesn’t signal the beginning of the end for the EU, the growing worldwide awareness of its Nazi roots almost certainly will.