Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33413 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-11
• Binding: Paperback
• 135 pages

Customer Reviews

Excellent
This book is a short (125 pages) diary-like record of the author's recruitment as Budget Execution Director and Chief Accountant of the EU, her attempts to reform inadequate accounting and their obstruction by European civil servants and EU commissioners, and her dismissal by the EU.

Most of the European civil servants' names have been changed, either because of libel laws or because the author says she still hopes for legal redress. In particular one Jean Maison, Director General of the Budget Directorate, who if the author is to be believed, would appear to be a Sir Humphrey gone very bad indeed.

This is an individual's record, and you must decide whether to take it at face value or write it off as a whinge (or perhaps somewhere in between.) The author's repeated and simple list of her department's failings and her attempts to reform them seemed intelligent and clear and I believe them. I doubt we will see a rebuttal; one of the central points of the book is that the EU bureacracy would only fight on its terms. Furthermore you can learn more about this complicated, and complicatedly dull, organisation in this short book than from much longer, impersonal volumes.

I found myself wondering whether the EU can ever work. The secrecy is outrageous. The unelected Commission, formed of failed and mediocre careerists like Neil Kinnock, operating in secret, proposes laws. A supine parliament (whose prostration will be partly due to incomes so massive they could be called bribes) sometimes has the power to examine and approve these laws. How can a continent that fought a war that was at least indirectly about democracy allow such a thing?

One gets the feeling that these things are unreformable. Shouldn't the EU, with the power it has now and that which it is now taking without national vetos, be reformed into elected President/Excutive, Legislature, with courts that act as such instead of informal means of refining and extending EU powers? This book gives a clear picture of how the self-serving duopoly of Commission and EU Civil Service could easily obstruct and prevent reform whilst promissing the opposite; but then think of the nations' horse trading (over for example the Common Agriculture Policy, 50 years old and bigger and more complex than ever,) the near absence of proper reporting, the publics' laziness and distraction and the national jealousies and obsessions of all of the above: I want to cry.

Incidentally the author is now an MEP for the UK Independence Party. That's all very ironic, but best possible luck to her grilling the EU accountants anew. My money would be on the parliament freezing her out again, by whatever means they can cook up.

Brussels Laid Bare by Marta Andreasen
This book should be compulsary reading for anyone of voting age.It is the account of one womans ongoing struggle to bring the European gravy train to some semblance of financial order. It affirms whay many of us have thought for a long number of years that the EU, its courts and it's colledge of 27 unelected commissioners are corrupt will do anything to stop exposure of their shady and corrupt dealings.The wastage of money and the unaccountabiliy of how it is spent beggars beleif. Who can the ordinary man/woman in the street trust. After the expenses scandal of our own MP's this is just another horror story. I wish Ms Andreasen well in her new post of MEP.
Please read it for yourselves

Excellent expose of the corrupt, undemocratic EU.
A book that gives an insiders view on how career politicians have conspired to create an elite club. A club where they feast upon taxpayers money and do very little other than feather their own nests.

You thought the Westminster crooks were bad, but this book exposes who the masters of corruption are. Indeed, it is probably because of the EU's malign influence, that our own domestic political class have become to corrupt.

Enough is enough. The author is a brave corruption buster and must be wished well in her efforts to get inside the beast and expose it even more.

Let's hope she wins with UKIP, so that a further expose can be written and help bring the whole rotten structure.