The European Parliament’s budgetary control committee has voted not to publish a report detailing abuses in the way some deputies use their monthly staff allowance. In the Tuesday morning session of the committee, the issue of whether to make the 92 page document public was raised, and voted down by 21 votes to 14.

UK Lib Dem MEP, Chris Davis called the decision “ridiculous,” and added that instead of being kept secret the document should be used as “a manifesto for change.”

“There are no names of individuals in this report, no political parties or nationalities mentioned. Therefore, I do not see why EU citizens should not be allowed to see it”, he said.

Danish MEP Jens-Peter Bonde from the Independence and Democracy group also called for the report to be made public, and gave some examples of its content.

“This shows that the budgetary control committee wants to scrutinise us, but doesn’t want to scrutinise its own affairs”, Mr Bonde said after the vote.

The fact that there are “crooks” in the European parliament is not a scandal in itself, as they exist everywhere, Mr Bonde said.

“The scandal is how you handle them. Then, it is bad image [for the European parliament]”, he added.

There are two versions of the report. The “soft” version - without names - is the one which MEPs are calling to be published. The one with names has been sent to the EU’s anti-fraud body, OLAF which will probably ignore it.

Swedish Green MEP Carl Schlyter has used his right as an EU citizen to ask for authorisation to see the parliament’s report and received a letter that his request is under process.

Any EU citizen is entitled to see any of the EU Parliament’s documents on the condition that the document does not contain names or, if it does, that the citizen accepts that the names be taken out. You can contact the Parliament via its snappily named Correspondence with Citizens Unit

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