The latest investigations centred on the European Parliament, this time related to Chinese tech giant Huawei, show that the EU’s current ethics system is not fit for the job, according to EU policy expert Alberto Alemanno, Jean Monnet Professor of EU Law at HEC in Paris.

In 2022, the European Parliament proposed a 14-point action plan in the wake of a cash-for-influence scandal, but it’s yet to be implemented. At the time, MEPs and assistants were under investigation for allegedly accepting bribes to act in the interest of foreign actors like Qatar and Morocco.

This week once more Belgian investigators searched homes and Huawei’s Brussels headquarters on suspicion that the Chinese company paid MEPs to influence legislation in the European Parliament. Huawei denies any wrongdoing.

Currently, enforcement of the lobbying rules is in the hands of the European Parliament and other European institutions, which basically means that there is a self-policing system, Alemanno said in an interview with Euronews.

“By design, the system is not working and is designed not to work, because there are no political incentives for the president in the European Parliament, who is also a political party member to enforce those rules, because if those are enforced, one, they could also be enforced against their political party. And I think this is really what explains why the current European ethics system is not fit for the job,” he said.

According to Alemanno, sitting and former MEPs are still able to peddle influence in the current environment.

“The members of the European Parliament today are still allowed to have side jobs so they can be members of the European Parliament, but also lawyers, lobbyists and advocate for different kind of causes in society that put them in a situation of conflict of interest,” he said.

Indeed Alemanno blames the large political parties in the EU for watering down legislation. The Parliament decided to establish an ethics body, he said, but it’s still not functioning.

However, despite the repeated corruption and transparency scandals, Alemanno does not think the EU’s reputation is put at risk.

“It’s very easy to qualify the European Union as a whole, as a very corrupt organisation, but in reality, even these scandals prove the opposite,” he said.

“It’s not the European Union per se a corrupt institution, but some of the members, a very few members of the European Parliament, which is one of the institutions, have been lending themselves to a possible attempt of corruption,” he said.