Subscribe here: https://bit.ly/eudebates The crime-writing Belgian ‘sheriff’ fighting EU corruption. One thing European parliamentarians should know about the man driving allegations of Qatari cash and influence peddling at the heart of the EU: He won’t stop.
Also, they might end up as characters in a crime thriller, written by the person who locked them up. In a series of raids that continued Tuesday, Claise and his team has secured €1.5 million in cash and arrested six people on preliminary charges of corruption, money laundering and criminal organization. One suspect is Eva Kaili, a Greek MEP who was one of the European Parliament’s vice presidents until she was stripped of that title Tuesday. The probe centers on a group who may have used their positions in parliament to promote Qatari interests. Kaili has said she is innocent and is due in court on Wednesday.
The corruption scandal in the European Parliament, according to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, is undermining citizens’ trust in European politics.
“Corruption is a crime,” she said Thursday in Brussels after a European summit. – We know that such events, such corruption destroy public confidence in the institutions. We have to work hard to regain confidence.”
Belgian law enforcement is investigating suspicions of corruption in the European Parliament, money laundering and foreign influence. Six suspects have been arrested since Friday, including the now sacked vice-president of the European Parliament, Eva Kaili. She remains under arrest. Two detainees were released.
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A revolutionary humanist
Claise’s biography reads like a crime-fighting prosecutor from central casting. His youthful parents abandoned him as a baby in a basket at his grandparents’ bakery in the Brussels suburb of Anderlecht, he told Le Soir in 2020. He grew up cutting bread before school and scrambling to read as many books as he could. His father never wanted to be part of his life and his relationship with his mother, who is now dead, was “extremely hard.”
He cites French revolutionary humanist values as his guiding principles. For him, financial crime has destroyed fundamental aspects of society. “White-collar crime is the cancer of democracy,” Claise wrote in one of his books, “Le Forain” (The Showman).
At the fashionable bookshop Filigranes, which serves the EU’s intellectual elite, you can find Claise’s novelizations of his own crime-fighting. “He has two parts to his life: personal and professional,” said the owner of the bookshop Marc Filipson, a friend. “When he is here, he has no phone, nothing.”
Claise’s charge sheet is a who’s who of Belgian white collar crime across the past two decades: it includes local banks Fortis and Belgolaise and insurance company AGF, but also multinational companies and Belgian nobility. In 2019, he forced the U.K. bank HSBC to pay a Belgian record penalty of €295 million for tax evasion, money laundering and other assorted crimes. Another nickname for Claise is ‘Mr. Hundred Millions,’ because of all the cash he has hauled back for the state.
“He did not care at all about the order of magnitude of his opponents,” said Crombez. “That’s how he operates: he doesn’t get scared easily.”
Operation Zero
Claise is known in Belgium for following through on cases, even those that are highly sensitive. His pursuit against money laundering gangs in Belgian football clubs, dubbed “Operation Zero,” shook up the entire football world, which is deeply intertwined with Belgian business and politics. Touchy diplomacy hasn’t perturbed him either, like issuing an international arrest warrant for the head of the Libyan Investment Authority because of their alleged links with Euroclear, a financial institution headquartered in Brussels.
One of his biggest operations was overseeing the dismantling of encrypted service SKY ECC, which led to the arrests of dozens of drug traffickers and suspected criminals. The bust was the largest-ever by police and prosecutors against drug cartels in the country, which is a key traffic point for cocaine in Europe.
Claise’s dramatic intervention has left the European institutions headquartered in Brussels scrambling to explain why it took a Belgian official to uncover corruption at the core of European democracy. A fleet of investigations is being launched amid calls for institutional reforms, including by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
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