UKIP: Certain MEPs need to get worried, Nikki Sinclaire in The Sunday Mirror & Roger Knapman considers his future

Nigel Farage: A man with a lot to hide!

Certain MEPs should start getting worried!

The likes of Derek Clark and Graham Booth should really come clean about their OLAF investigations. Both have now concluded and yet the pair are still reluctant to let members the outcome. Very silly!

From The Sunday Times

A landmark ruling in the European Court of Justice could force MEPs to disclose evidence of misconduct and financial abuse

Bojan Pancevski Published: 12 June 2011

The European parliament could be forced to disclose wide-ranging evidence of financial abuse and misconduct by MEPs after a landmark court ruling last week.

On Tuesday the European Court of Justice ruled that the parliament must release a 2008 report which documented the way MEPs can manipulate allowances to pocket more than £1m from a single five-year term, in addition to their salaries.

The Sunday Times website is today publishing the full report, which the parliament has tried to suppress. Even now it plans to appeal against the court ruling, which follows a three-year battle by Ciaran Toland, an Irish campaigner.

In 2009 this newspaper published part of the report drawn up by Robert Galvin, the parliament’s chief internal auditor.

Abuses include MEPs claiming up to £180,000 in annual staff allowances without having to keep any proof; awarding themselves bonuses of up to 1½ times salary and diverting public money into front companies. The ruling could also result in the parliament having to disclose information including:

- Names of MEPs forced to repay money or found to have committed wrongdoing.

- Internal audits showing abuse of funds by MEPs or senior eurocrats.

- Details of purchases including cars and furniture and information about contracts, some of which have reportedly been awarded without a tendering procedure.

It is understood that more than 10 MEPs are being investigated for possible abuse of funds and could be forced to return money.

Also see: LINK

Nikki Sinclaire in The Sunday Mirror

Nikki continues to get publicity in the national media. We note that Farage was going to get a mention but was dropped just before the following article went to press. It is refreshing to see that the media now consider UKIP's Fuhrer an irrelevance.

Scandal of £51k trip to Seychelles

by: Ben Griffith

EIGHT MEPs will enjoy a £51,000, three-day fishing trip to the Seychelles – paid for by the taxpayers.

Members of the European Parliament Fisheries Committee will see how EU cash for the sunny Indian Ocean Islands is spent.

Each delegate will get £130-a-day expenses as well as luxury accommodation.

None of the UK’s three MEPs on the committee is going and West Midlands MEP Nikki Sinclaire slammed the trip as “flagrant waste of public money”.

She said “Most people can only dream of going to the Indian Ocean. They should be ashamed.”

Committee vice-chairman Struan Stevenson said “It is necessary to go to see where the money is being spent.”

To read the original: LINK

Roger Knapman

We can confirm that Roger Knapman has been asked by an increasing number of disgruntled UKIPPERS to return to active politics and save UKIP from Farage and his bumbling sycophants. But is it too late?

From Critical Reaction

When Being Baldwinian is a Good Thing

Maybe not Roger, over and out after all?

There may well be no second acts in American life, but what about UKIP? Rumour comes our way that Roger Knapman, the Cincinnatus of Withdrawalism, might be prepared to temporarily return as UKIP’s leader in order to try and salvage that bedraggled party. No one surely can be any doubt about the depth of the crisis UKIP is in.

Leader after leader after leader has been undermined from within; no credible effort has been made to professionalise the party or its personnel; scandal surrounds it and with good cause; no serious prospect of even a Green-style, single Westminster constituency break-through is on the cards (Farage’s stroke of genius in Buckingham resulting in a humiliating 3rd place behind John Stevens); MEP after MEP departs UKIP once elected to Strasbourg; opportunities, most infamously the Kilroy-Silk moment, are unerringly squandered; such funds as are raised, rightly from donors or more dubiously from the EU itself are wasted; legal cases are needlessly fought and lost; and the only thing consistent other than failure is the enduring presence of one man: Nigel Farage.

We have long argued that he is a liability, but perhaps we need make the case with still greater emphasis. Whatever David Campbell-Bannerman imagines, ‘cast-iron’ Cameron can’t be trusted on Europe to do anything other than keep us in. And UKIP if it serves any purpose at all obliges Europhile Tory leaders to at least affect scepticism at election time, even if they don’t very often deliver it in office. Should Nigel Farage – currently embroiled in the noxiously wrong goal of building of all things, a ‘pan-European political party’ – finally complete his seeming life’s work and destroy Britain’s most high-profile Withdrawalist organisation, he will liberate David Cameron from the Right, and this Prime Minister hardly needs any more reason or opportunity to follow his own pro-membership leanings.

Should Knapman in fact will be willing to get back into the swamp of UKIP for even a short period, he would potentially be doing Britain a service at least as brave and as decent as he did when he stood against Maastricht all those years ago. It’s five minutes to midnight for UKIP and the best thing she could possibly get would be some honest Euroscepticism again.

To read the original: LINK