CORRUPTION IN THE EU PARLIAMENT
Readers will recall that on 19th December 2022 I said I was not entirely surprised to see that a Vice-President of the European Parliament had been arrested for corruption, and that the homes and hotels of 18 MEPs and officials had been searched by the police, yielding suitcases stuffed with banknotes.
The reason I was not surprised is that I have never been able to understand how, in the absence of improper pressure, it was possible to impose a ban on “oxo-degradable” plastic products (by Art. 5 of the Single-use plastics Directive 2019/904) without any dossier from the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) showing any justification for such a ban. To make matters worse, the Commission had actually asked ECHA (under Art 69 of the REACH Regulation) to study whether these products created microplastics. ECHA received hundreds of pages of evidence but were then instructed to by the Commission terminate the study, and the Parliament proceeded to legislate anyway.
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