TWO MORE REASONS TO LEAVE
One’s got a criminal conviction. The other’s mired in controversy – yet they are new EU presidents who make Tusk & Co look like saints
WHETHER you are for or against Brexit, the EU has hardly enhanced its reputation through the behaviour of its top brass. President of the EU Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, and EU Council President Donald Tusk have shown themselves to be stubborn, unimaginative and keener on political point scoring than securing a Withdrawal deal which is best for everyone.
Now, finally, it is all change at the top of the EU. But if you were hoping for better qualified, more competent EU leaders then dream on.
Two of the EU’s new guard, Christine Lagarde, who has no experience of banking but has been appointed head of the European Central Bank, and Ursula von der Leyen, Juncker’s replacement as President of the Commission although she’s proved a lamentable Defence Minister in her native Germany, hardly inspire confidence. There are questions, too, over their integrity.
So just who are they and how did they come to be appointed?
‘A CASE OF BEING BOOTED UPSTAIRS’
FIGHTER jets and helicopters that don’t fly, warships and submarines that cannot put out to sea, guns that miss the target when they get too hot, and a lack of everything from ammunition to underwear.
That, it is claimed, is the parlous state of the German Army under the tenure of the country’s Defence Minister and now President of the European Commission.
Her elevation to the top job in Europe is said to be her reward for political loyalty to Angela Merkel rather than any display of competence as a member of the Chancellor’s government since 2005.
Others say it is a classic case of someone whose services are no longer required being ‘booted upstairs’.
Indeed, Von der Leyen, who in 2013 was appointed as the first female Defence Minister, has only united German politicians across the political divide in questioning her suitability for her new role.
One described her as ‘ the weakest member’ of the German government and others call her ‘the soloist’ owing to her tendency to act on her own without consulting others.
‘ No matter where you look, there’s dysfunction,’ a senior German officer at Bundeswehr HQ told the Politico website.
Last December, Von der Leyen was called before a parliamentary committee to answer charges over alleged poor handling of defence contracts, which in some cases involved suspected nepotism.
In one scandal, the costs of repairing a naval training vessel spiralled from 10 million to 135 million euros.
The Bundestag has held hearings into accusations that Von der Leyen’s office circumvented public procurement rules in granting contracts worth millions of euros to private firms.
However, none of this seems to have harmed the progress of a woman born into the ‘EU aristocracy’. The daughter of Ernst Albrecht, one of the original Eurocrats when the European Economic Community was formed in 1957, she was brought up in Brussels where she attended the famous European School.
It was an upbringing, rubbing shoulders with the middle- class children of other well- to- do Eurocrats, which led to her becoming a fervent enthusiast for European integration.
In 2011, von der Leyen called for a ‘United States of Europe’ — something which the ultra-federalist may well use her new role to bring to fruition.
She is, of course, fiercely antiBrexit, describing events since the referendum as a ‘burst bubble of hollow promises... inflated by populists’ and last year saying that Brexit is a ‘loss for everyone’.
Von der Leyen, now 60, is proud of her roots; of her wealthy cotton merchant ancestors in Bremen, while her husband of 33 years, Heiko von der Leyen, a medical professor and CEO of a medical engineering firm, is a descendant of an even posher family of silk-weavers.
When Von der Leyen came to study at the London School of Economics in 1978, her family wealth was feared to put her at the risk of kidnap by the Red Army Faction — a German farLeft terrorist group. She studied economics under the pseudonym ‘Rose Ladson’. Later, she switched to medicine, was awarded a doctorate in 1990, and practised as a gynaecologist — giving birth to seven children herself between 1987- 1999. The family are Lutheran Evangelical Christians.
Her academic career, however, threatened to unwind in 2016 when she was accused of plagiarism in her doctoral thesis. After an investigation, Hanover Medical School decided that Von der Leyen was guilty only of a mistake, not intentional copying.
THE WHIFF OF NEGLIGENCE
JUST before Christmas in 2016, in the very room in the Palais de Justice in Paris where MarieAntoinette was sentenced to be guillotined, Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, was found guilty of ‘negligence with public money’ over a multi-million Euro payout to a business tycoon.
Yet, unlike the French queen, Lagarde escaped with barely a slap on the wrist. The court waived a one-year prison sentence and a 15,000 euro fine, on the grounds of her ‘ international reputation’ which, cynics might observe, is a rather rum approach to justice.
Lagarde was finance minister in Nicolas Sarkozy’s government in 2007 when she approved a 404million euro payout (£363m) of taxpayers’ money to a controversial French businessman and friend of Sarkozy, Bernard Tapie.
It was a long-running case that revolved around the sale by Tapie of his majority share in sportswear company Adidas to a bank, Credit Lyonnais, part owned by the state.
When the bank sold the shares at a higher price, Tapie accused it of defrauding him and the payment was in effect compensation awarded by a private arbitration panel.
Lagarde was convicted for failing to contest the panel’s ruling when there were solid grounds for doing so. She insisted that she had only ever done her duty and may have been misled by civil servants.
The verdict on the high profile case did nothing to dent Lagarde’s career. Within 24 hours, the IMF — Sarkozy had lobbied hard for her to get the job in 2011 — in Washington DC gave her their full backing.
And so she has continued on her trail-blazing way ever since — to her likely new appointment as President of the European Central Bank.
With her penchant for Chanel suits and Hermes scarves, Lagarde is known as the ‘ rock star of finance’. But unusually for the putative head of a central bank she has no banking experience.
She herself has acknowledged her limitations in the field, saying in 2012: ‘ I’ve studied a bit of economics, but I’m not a superduper economist.’
Lagarde is famously outspoken on Brexit — claiming she can’t see ‘any positive side to it’ — and an ally of former Chancellor George Osborne and the Project Fear cadre. At a press conference in 2016 with Osborne, she warned Brexit would be ‘pretty bad, to very, very bad’.
Lagarde also chooses to ignore that the IMF’s predictions for the UK have been consistently wrong.
At 63, she exerts discipline over every aspect of her life — a teetotal vegetarian who works out every day, swims, and cycles up to 20 miles a week.
She has enjoyed an intriguing love life, married and divorced twice, with two sons in their 30s with her first husband. Her current partner is old love, Xavier Giocanti, a Corsican businessman she met at law school.