European Council president Charles Michel spent ?500,000 on priv

https://www.yahoo.com/news/european-council-president-charles-michel-151501379.html

European Council president Charles Michel spent £500,000 on private jet to China
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Joe Barnes
Wed, April 12, 2023 at 10:15 AM CDT
9
Joe Barnes
Wed, April 12, 2023 at 10:15 AM CDT
Charles Michel has taken private jets to Germany and Austria despite EU rules saying commercial flights must be taken when possible - Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg
Charles Michel has taken private jets to Germany and Austria despite EU rules saying commercial flights must be taken when possible - Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg
Charles Michel is under fire after he almost quadrupled the European Council's travel budget jetting around the world in private planes.

The council’s president spent more than a quarter of his current annual £1.7 million budget last year on an ill-advised trip to meet Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, in Beijing.

The European Union’s most senior official booked taxpayer-funded “air taxis” on more than ten occasions last year to ferry himself and his army of aides, press officers and photographers around the planet.

This included travelling separately from Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president, on a private jet to an environment summit in Brest, north-west France because the pair were embroiled in a bitter feud.

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To help pay for his expensive habit for flying private, Brussels has been forced to hike his travel expenses to £2.2m this year, a 26 per cent increase of his spending for 2024.

Keen to bolster his reputation on the world stage, Mr Michel, the former Belgium prime minister, has already spent around four-times more than his predecessors, Donald Tusk and Herman Van Rompuy, whose costs did not surpass £440,000 each.

“Charles Michel is attached to status, private planes and big cars,” a diplomat told France’s respected Le Monde newspaper. “His travel dossier reads like 'Around the World in 80 Private Jets'," a second source quipped to The Telegraph.

Cristian Terhes, a Romanian MEP, said: “Charles Michel, the former prime minister of a small European state, seems now addicted to taxpayer-funded junkets. It is very difficult to justify this huge jump in expenditure for his exploits in foreign travel. Clearly it does his ego a lot of good, but much less for the member states of the European Union.

“This gives wings to the axiom that the EU is a racket to take money off taxpayers to hand it to politicians and their friends.”

Charles Michel took a private jet to the Cop27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh last November, at a cost of around £100,000 - NurPhoto
Charles Michel took a private jet to the Cop27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh last November, at a cost of around £100,000 - NurPhoto
His overseas “missions” using private transport have included trips to China, Turkey, Egypt and the United Kingdom. EU rules allow for its top officials to fly privately if no other commercial routes are viable, but the guidelines are often ignored.

The jaunt to Beijing, which was criticised by Berlin and Paris at the time, raised significant eyebrows after spending more than £405,000 to accept an invite from Xi Jinping in December 2022.

Mr Michel’s team argued the trip was necessary to avoid being entangled in China’s draconian coronavirus rules.

“It was not possible to book a commercial flight due to Covid regulations in China, which would have required the president and his delegation to be quarantined for two weeks,” his office explained.

The Council president also favours private flights for more accessible destinations that are well served by commercial routes from Brussels.

In January last year, he chartered a £18,000 jet from Luxavation, the firm that holds the EU's contract for private jets, to meet chancellor Karl Nehammer in Austria. A month later, Mr Michel spent £33,000 to fly to Berlin to meet with German leader Olaf Scholz.

The top eurocrat used Luxavation to attend a dinner in Paris, at a cost of around £30,000, despite the journey being an hour by rail from the Belgian capital. And every time he attended the European Parliament in Strasbourg, he spent between £10,000 and £30,000 for the five journeys by private jet.

Despite private planes being considered damaging to the environment, Mr Michel shared a jet with Mrs von der Leyen to the Cop27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh last November, at a cost of around £100,000.

A spokesman for Mr Michel said many of the foreign trips, which are normally the work of the bloc’s national leaders, were needed to build international relations because of the war in Ukraine.

“We must explain to third countries our sanctions against Moscow and fight against Putin's narrative that they are responsible for inflation,” the official added.

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