Skint? Farage earns up to £800k a year!
‘Whose interests are they serving?’
NIGEL Farage has pocketed up to £700,000 on top of his £90,000 MEP’s salary after last year complaining he was ‘skint’.
A report yesterday listed the former Ukip leader as the sixth-highest earner in a list of ‘moonlighting’ MEPs.
Most of his extra earnings are from broadcasting contracts. Mr Farage, 54, has a five- days-aweek show on talk channel LBC and often appears on TV commenting on Brexit.
Yesterday he said he would have ‘no choice’ but to return to frontline politics if Theresa May’s Conservatives continued their current Brexit strategy.
In an interview with the Mail last year Mr Farage said ‘there’s no money in politics’ and declared that he was skint. However, since July 2014 he has declared extra income amounts varying from £520,000 to £700,000 per year.
The figures were published yesterday by Transparency International, which compiled the list from hundreds of declarations of interest made by the European Parliament’s 751 MEPs.
Yesterday Mr Farage’s spokesman claimed it was part of a ‘vindictive campaign’ by the parliament to persecute eurosceptics. ‘This allegation is all part of their politically motivated assault,’ he said. The report reveals that nearly a third of MEPs have second jobs or earn extra incomes outside the parliament, adding up to a total of £36million since July 2014. They declare the earnings in broad brackets of ‘minimum’ to ‘maximum’.
Many list just one or two words alongside their declarations. Mr Farage’s reads ‘broadcast contracts’ while others simply put ‘doctor’, ‘entrepreneur’ or ‘lawyer’.
The top earner was Renato Soru, an Italian socialist who sits on the board of telecommunications giant Tiscali. He has pocketed up to £1.4million per annum.
In second place was Antanas Guoga, a Lithuanian MEP, who also declared outside annual earnings of up to £1.2 million.
He lists the activities that earned the extra cash as ‘poker player + entrepreneur’. Guy Verhofstadt, 65, an arch Europhile who is the parliament’s chief Brexit negotiator, finished third on the list with extra earnings ranging from £820,000 to £1.24million.
The former Belgian Prime Minister, who races vintage British racing cars and owns a Tuscan vineyard, earns most of it from a lucrative position on the board of Sofina, a Belgian investment company.
His spokesman said: ‘ He has always declared his mandates openly. He also stresses that he is not lobbying for companies.’ More than 1,366 outside activities were declared by MEPs, with around 30 making more from outside interests than their salaries.
The annual pre-tax income for MEPs is roughly € 101,800 – or around £90,000 – compared to Westminster MPs on £67,000 a year.
They pay a low 22 per cent special tax rate for European Union officials and on top of that can claim around £80,000 a year in ‘daily subsistence’ and ‘general expenditure’ allowances without having to provide receipts to prove their spending.
Last week the parliament decided to keep details of how MEPs spend their £35million a year in allowances a secret, despite growing pressure for more openness.
Daniel Freund of Transparency International said: ‘Large outside incomes pose a serious risk of conflicts of interest. Whose interests do these MEPs really represent?
‘That of citizens or the interests of those that pay their side jobs?’