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Eurealist :: Anything to declare, Mr Barroso?: “Anything to declare, Mr Barroso?
by Eurealist at 07:40AM (BST) on April 24, 2005 | Permanent Link | Cosmos
Telegraph | News | Christopher Booker’s notebook When it emerged last week that two EU commissioners, Peter Mandelson and José Manuel Barroso, the Commission’s Portuguese president, hadn’t declared hospitality received on the yachts of two billionaires, it was inevitable that British media attention would centre on Mr Mandelson. But far more serious are the issues raised by President Barroso’s admission that last year, just before he took office, he spent six days on the yacht of Spiros Latsis, one of the richest and most powerful businessmen in Greece. José Manuel Barroso José Manuel Barroso The previous week, all 25 commissioners had agreed that Mr Barroso’s holiday posed no conflict of interest. Yet what they may not have known was the substantial involvement of Mr Latsis’s group of banking, petroleum, engineering and construction companies in the new Athens International Airport, at £1.6 billion the most expensive airport project in Europe. This was constructed by a German company Hochtief, with the aid of nearly £900 million-worth of funding from EU taxpayers and the EU’s European Investment Bank (EIB). Although Hochtief and the Latsis group are partners in a series of part-EU-funded construction projects in Greece, the European Commission’s chief spokesman said last week that she was ‘not aware that the group had benefited from EU funding’. Even more relevant is the ongoing controversy over EU funding of the airport at Spata, near Athens, on which I reported here as long ago as March 2004, and in which it now emerges that the Latsis group has significant interests.”