by Dr Richard North
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Seven minutes to change the worldToday, at a time yet to be decided (as we write) José Manuel Durao Barroso,president of the EU commission, will stand up in the chamber of the EUparliament in Brussels to defend himself (and his commission) against amotion of no confidence, brought by Nigel Farage and 73 or more other MEPs
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Although there will be no vote on the day, the result is a foregoneconclusion. All the major political groups oppose the motion and, when itcomes to a vote in Strasbourg, they will easily defeat it.Farage will have exactly seven minutes to make his case, giving him about athousand words to set out an indictment that could, with justice, run tohundreds of pages.
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Apart from the headline issue of Barroso takinghospitality from multi-billionaire Spiros Latsis, when one of his companieswas awaiting a decision from the commission as to whether it could be paidover €10 million in state aid grants, there are many other issues that couldbe aired.For instance, it is of some considerable public interest to establish theprecise nature of the funding at Athens Sparta Airport, and the precise roleplayed by the Latsis Group of companies, not least Eurobank, which handledthe payments of EU money.
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In a country that is awash with EU money, under the multi-billion euro"Community Support Framework III" programme, a country that is also aby-word for corruption, questions might be asked about the funding of themotorway and road building programme – set to receive over €9 billion in EUfunds and loans.In particular, questions could be asked about the tenders for the Elefsinato Patra Motorway and the Ionian Road, and the contract, valued at over €200million for which two consortia, Olympic Roads and the Aegean MotorwayGroup, have been recently short-listed with commission approval.
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The latter group should, perhaps, get special scrutiny as it includes a firmin the Lamda Group – one of Latsis's companies – and a firm called Hochtief,one of Germany's largest building companies, one, incidentally that managedthe Sparta airport contract.Hochtief is an especially interesting company, with a chequered history. Ithas been named in relation to the bribery scandal in the World Bank-FundedLesotho Water Project, where a dozen major international dam-buildingcompanies lavishly bribed at least one top official on the project,allegedly giving nearly US$2 million in bribes over ten years. The HighlandsWater Venture, a consortium which included Hochtief, was directly linkedwith $733,404-worth of bribes.
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Then there is the affair of the Southern Cross Airport Corporation Limited,to which the federal government awarded the ownership of the SydneyKingsford Smith Airport, involving Hochtief in circumstances which had anAustralian "waste and corruption" website flag it up. Add to that, theaffair of the Berlin airport, and why Hochtief was disbarred from biddingfor redevelopment by the courts, and an interesting picture emerges.
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Yet, Hochtief is one of the companies on whose behalf Schröder intervenedwith President George W. Bush, asking him to invite them to bid for $4.5billion worth of contracts. In this context, it could well be asked whatprofessional or other links there are between Schröder and Hochtief, and therole this company might have played in funding Schröder's SDP.One might then ask why Schröder took it upon himself to intervene personallyto prevent the EU parliament's socialist group calling Barroso to explainhis links with Latsis, one at least of whose companies is linked withHochtief.
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All this Farage could do, but for the fact, in what is a parody of"transparency", he has precisely seven minutes. In short, Farage has sevenminutes to change the world – or, at least, the EU.
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He isn't going to beable to do it, but he might lay down some interesting markers.
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