The liberals, socialists, greens, and left groups in the European Parliament have criticised plans for an EU Ethics Body by the European Commission during an exchange with Commission Vice-President Věra Jourová.

At a meeting of the Parliament’s political group leaders on Thursday (4 May), the EU’s Values and Transparency commissioner Jourová made a preliminary presentation of the EU Ethics Body draft proposal which is likely to be formally submitted by the EU executive in early June.

However, group leaders were quick to criticise the Commission’s plans.

“The direction that the Commission seems to be taking would not constitute a genuine and effective ethics body,” Iratxe Garcia Perez, president of the socialist and democrats (S&D) group at the European Parliament, told EURACTIV.

“For example, by not having the right to start an investigation on its own initiative, the ethics body would lack the teeth needed to ensure the same ethics standards are being applied across all EU institutions.”

The president of the liberal Renew Europe group, Stéphane Séjourné, told EURACTIV that “as far as we have heard [from the Commission], we are still far from the ambition voted by the European Parliament.”

He referred to a resolution on the Ethics Body the Parliament approved in December, a few days after the first arrests related to Qatargate, which called for the body to have more power to prosecute cases of conflict of interests.

During the CoP meeting, the co-President of The Left group Manon Aubry expressed her disappointment that the discussion with Jourová was behind closed doors and described the new transparency proposals as “not sufficient”.

The Green/EFA MEP Daniel Freund, who wrote the resolution on the EU Ethics Body back in September 2021, told EURACTIV that “we want a body that deals with individual cases of misconduct. We expect from the Commission a proposal that reflects that. What was presented at the CoP fall short”.

The European People’s Party, for their part, said that “there were no disagreements because there is not yet a written proposal,” an official source from group told EURACTIV.

“The EPP supported the creation of the body, the big question for all is if the inter-institutional agreement needed to put it in place will be ready before the elections 2024” the source added.

The EU Ethics Body is a sensitive topic among EU leaders in the wake of the Qatargate corruption scandal which rocked the EU institutions at the start of this year, with a handful of MEPs and officials in Brussels arrested and accused of accepting bribes from the likes of Qatar and Morocco in exchange for political support.

Since then, the European Parliament has started a reform process of the institutions and promised to take a zero-tolerance approach.

On 8 February, the political groups endorsed a package of internal procedures reform, the 14 points put forward by EU Parliament chief Roberta Metsola, which contains provisions to prevent corruption, including a proposal to create an EU ethics body to combat conflict of interests.

Unlike other measures the Parliament can internally implement on its own, it is up to the Commission to make the proposal on an ethics body.

According to a Commission source, the executive is working on the final draft that could be ready in early June.