Andreasen loses legal appeal, but vows to keep on fighting

A European court throws out MEP Marta Andreasen’s claim of unfair dismissal from the Commission

Marta Andreasen, who was sacked as chief accountant of the European Commission and is now a member of the European Parliament, has lost an appeal against her dismissal. The EU’s General Court last week upheld a decision of the European Civil Service Tribunal and ordered Andreasen to pay her own legal costs and those of the Commission.

Undaunted, Andreasen said this week that she was looking at the possibility of a further appeal to the European Court of Justice and would file a case at the European Court of Human Rights.

The General Court threw out Andreasen’s arguments that her dismissal was disproportionate and violated EU rules, as well as her rights to a fair trial and good administration under the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.

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In 2002, Andreasen, who had fallen out with the then director-general for budget, went public with complaints about the Commission’s accounting system. She told MEPs and the European Court of Auditors that the Commission’s book-keeping left the EU’s annual budget vulnerable to fraud.

Court ruling

The Argentine-Spaniard was initially moved from her position as chief accountant, then suspended on full pay. She was sacked in 2004 after a disciplinary board found she had breached staff regulations by making unauthorised public statements about her work, and by failing to follow orders from her managers. The civil service tribunal later upheld the dismissal in a ruling of November 2007.

“The whole procedure is ludicrous,” Andreasen said. “In my appeal I already focused on a breach of human rights which they [the judges] just disregarded.”

“I thought I had put the case correctly, and they just dismissed it,” she said. She added that she was annoyed that the appeal had taken almost three years from the initial ruling.

In 2009, Andreasen was elected to the European Parliament as a British MEP for the UK Independence Party. She was treasurer of UKIP in 2007-09, but resigned in protest at how the party was being managed.