The Parliament has been embroiled in a fresh corruption scandal that involves “preliminary charges of active corruption, forgery of documents, money laundering,” Belgian federal prosecutors said last week.
Metsola argued that “on that fateful” night of December 2022 when the Qatargate scandal broke out, she had “two options.”
Either changing nothing, because “there will always be people who will try to break the rules” or to look at which could be fixed. Metsola said she picked the latter, unfolding a 14-point plan that helped create the alarm bells that would sound for Parliament and the police to identify future cases of corruption.
“The one thing I will not do is allow the allegations or the alleged work of potentially a few individuals, to tarnish the work of hundreds of others,” she added.
Belgian authorities on Tuesday charged four people on counts of corruption and criminal organization as part of an alleged cash-for-influence campaign by the Chinese technology giant Huawei.
Searches took place in the European Parliament in Brussels on Monday, which had already been sealed following raids on other addresses on March 13.
