Portrait of an MEP’s jet-set life in the gray zone

BRUSSELS — Maybe it’s the cloudy weather in the EU capital.

Back home in the Mediterranean resort hub of Mallorca, José Ramón Bauzá Díaz made sunlight and transparency core parts of his political brand as president of Spain’s Balearic Islands. As an EU lawmaker in Brussels, however, transparency campaigners say he has pushed use of the rules into an ethical gray area.

On interest groups’ dime, Bauzá visited Bahrain and Bologna, Dubai and Doha — but didn’t file the required disclosures until a separate bribery scandal involving Qatar engulfed the Parliament. Before that, it took press coverage and a ruling from the Parliament’s technical services before he acknowledged another potential conflict of interest. And now, he’s under investigation amid allegations of workplace harassment — a probe he and his political group in the Parliament have confirmed is underway.

While Bauzá has faced no direct accusation of corruption, his behavior has drawn critical press coverage at home, with some questioning his profuse praise of Qatar in the lead-up to it hosting the World Cup. And it’s in sharp contrast to his early days in politics in the sunny Mediterranean islands, when Bauzá pushed through one of Spain’s toughest political ethics codes in a bid to reform his scandal-plagued Popular Party.

“You must not only be honest, but also appear so," Bauzá said in 2012, a year after being elected president of the Balearic Islands, which include Mallorca and Ibiza.

A decade later, Bauzá announced that he was shutting down the Doha-linked club for MEPs he chaired — known as a “friendship group” — in the wake of accusations that landed three of his colleagues in jail temporarily, in the cash-for-influence scandal that emerged last December, which came to be known as Qatargate. He’s been on the defensive about multiple public appearances with the head of Qatar Airways and travel to the Gulf state as part of an official delegation, in addition to other jaunts paid for by outside interests.

But beyond missed reporting deadlines, these acts fall within code — and that’s part of the problem, say ethics watchdogs. Bauzá’s behavior as a member of the European Parliament is far from unique. Yet the scandal has forced a reckoning in the Parliament regarding more quotidian (and legal) avenues for influence and ingratiation, combined with lax enforcement of existing rules.

The European Commission’s recently released proposal for a panel to streamline ethics standards across the EU institutions aims to clarify these shades of gray into clear black-and-white rules.

“This is exactly what the ethics body will do: setting the high standards, being very clear,” Věra Jourová, Commission vice president for values and transparency, told MEPs Tuesday, as she cited “underserved privileges” as driving mistrust in democratic institutions. “Trips, forget it — forget financing from private parties,” she added. “There shouldn’t be any third-party pay.”

Bauzá, a backbench, first-term EU lawmaker with a specialty in tourism issues and a professional interest in the Middle East, now finds himself a case in point. In a bid to restore trust in the EU’s only institution directly accountable to voters ahead of European elections in 2024, MEPs are now considering restrictions on side jobs and limits on freebies outside groups could use to influence parliamentarians.

"The fallout from the Qatargate scandal has demonstrated that firstly, MEP ethics rules are far too weak — and secondly, how the implementation and enforcement of those rules is also totally inadequate,” said Vicky Cann of Corporate Europe Observatory, a nongovernmental group focused on political integrity.

Bauzá, now a member of the Renew group in the European Parliament, told POLITICO his approach to ethics in Brussels is "exactly the same" as it was in Spain. As soon as any mistake came to light, Bauzá added, "I have corrected it immediately."

Flying the friendly skies

In mid-December, with a vice president of Parliament — Eva Kaili — under arrest amid accusations that her outspoken praise for Qatari labor reforms had been bought with suitcases of cash, Bauzá was a logical target for scrutiny.

After all, he took on a role as one of the Parliament’s top advocates for the tiny Gulf monarchy as chair of the embassy’s EU-Qatari Friendship Group. A member of the Transport Committee, he lauded Qatar Airways for its mid-pandemic flight full of vaccinated passengers in April 2021.

In September of that year, he’d appeared — in a blue mask, red tie and white pocket square — sitting next to socialist MEP Marc Tarabella (one of the EU lawmakers later arrested and charged in Qatargate) as part of a European Parliament delegation to Qatar. Bauzá was “so impressed,” he said, by Doha’s efforts to reunite Afghan refugee children with their families.

His most recent visit to Qatar was just days before the scandal broke, during the country’s hosting of the World Cup, when he met with the Gulf state’s minister of state for foreign affairs.

“I have NEVER received, nor have they even offered me, a single €” for defending Qatar, Bauzá tweeted the day after Eva Kaili, her parliamentary assistant partner and an ex-MEP were arrested.

He concluded his thread: “Transparency, transparency and transparency. The only possible answer.”

Yet some of his own travel details stayed hidden for months past the Parliament’s deadline.

Rush to disclosex

A member of the Parliament’s Transport and Tourism committee who leads work on a sustainable aviation file, Bauzá updated his declarations page to include a series of trips bankrolled by interest groups on January 12, a month after allegations first surfaced that the Gulf state had paid cash for influence in the European Parliament.

Hailing from a tourist mecca, the liberal MEP takes a keen interest in travel and tourism issues — he sits on the steering group of the TRAN Committee’s Tourism Task Force — and is a regular on the industry conference circuit.

Though he’d been diligent about disclosing some of his trips in the past — including a jaunt paid for by Qatar Airways ­— the five new entries missed the deadline by months; or in some cases, years.

Among them was a visit to the Qatar-sponsored Doha Forum in March 2022, in which the organizers paid for his stay at the upmarket JW Marriott hotel in the Gulf state’s capital.

Under the European Parliament’s rules, lawmakers are supposed to announce any trips paid for by outside groups by the end of the month after the trip took place.

Another included a three-night stay at the Rixos Premium hotel in Dubai, where prices start at €250 a night, paid for by the Global Tourism Forum, which the MEP didn’t declare for 10 months.

Bauzá also took more than six months to confirm his stay at the five-star Gulf Hotel in Bahrain, which was paid for by King Hamad Global Centre for Peaceful Coexistence. And a free two-night stay at the Holiday Inn in Kraków in January 2020 paid for by the European Jewish Association was declared two years late. Not to mention how the organizers of Aviation Event, an industry conference, put him up at the Royal Hotel Carlton in Bologna in August 2021, he acknowledged a year and a half later.

By the time he reported all these trips in January this year, Bauzá had wound down the so-called friendship group he chaired with Qatar, “in view of the very serious events of the last few days, and until we get to the bottom of the matter.”

While Bauzá was conspicuous for the number of late travel filings, he was far from alone. A Transparency International analysis found that 67 percent of the post-scandal disclosures of travel organized by third parties were late.

To date, no MEP has faced sanction for breaching the rules on late trip filings.

In Brussels, Transparency International Deputy Director Nick Aiossa said, "There are a lot of reformers and transparency advocates that come to the Parliament and find themselves in a culture of impunity. The European Parliament doesn’t encourage transparent, accountable and ethical behavior."

"As it happened to more than 75 MEPs, it was an oversight," Bauzá said in an e-mailed reply to questions.

Last-mile moonlighting

Another way European parliamentarians walk a fine line is with side jobs — a practice that has ethics specialists hand-wringing about conflicts of interest.

Bauzá, too, has walked this line.

Running for reelection as the president of the Balearic Islands in 2015, Bauzá posted all of his income statements and assets on a website, vowing full transparency.

But five years later, the Spanish press would call him out for “hiding” a shareholder role from the European Parliament.

After a business and leadership course he took at the University of Deusto, Bauzá helped turn a class assignment into a real startup. Gas2Move, with its focus on so-called last-mile logistics, using natural gas-powered delivery vehicles, proved enticing to investors including Enagás, Spain’s natural gas grid operator, which eventually took it over.

When he joined the European Parliament in 2019, Bauzá did not disclose that he held shares in the startup. Confronted by El Diario, he said that not only was his 1 percent share too minuscule to matter, but that a conflict of interest was “impossible” because he didn’t sit on the Parliament’s environment committee.

He is, nonetheless, the Renew group’s spokesperson on the transport committee. Six months later, he updated his disclosure to include the Gas2Move shares as a position with “political implications,” following advice from the Parliament’s technical services.

In fact, Bauzá did soon find himself making key votes of relevance to his startup: In both the Transport Committee and the plenary, he weighed in on a vote over whether or not to phase out the internal combustion engine. But as he pointed out, his votes against the 2035 shift away from petrol cars was “manifestly against” the interests of the clean energy startup, he said in a statement.

As of March, the conflict no longer exists. Enagás ceased the operations of the company, by then called Llewo. The shareholders aren’t likely to see a payout, according to a spokesperson for the utility.

Scrutiny on style

Bauzá is also being accused of allegedly mistreating one of his team — another practice in Parliament that’s the subject of widespread whispers but difficult to pin down.

Last month, El Confidencial reported that the Parliament is investigating a psychological harassment complaint filed last summer by one of his assistants. A Renew spokesperson confirmed that the group had been informed of the inquiry, but declined to comment further “out of respect for all parties involved.”

Bauzá said confidentiality requirements barred him from commenting on the case — "not even to defend myself."

Yet the outcome of that investigation — or any other, for that matter — isn’t relevant to Bauzá’s political future, as he ruled out running for office again.

"Four years ago I decided to leave politics, and, in fact, I did it," he said in the email. "But this opportunity arose, and I accepted it knowing that it would be the last years of my political career."

Yet Bauzá’s jet-setting could have implications for the next class in the European Parliament, to be chosen just over a year from now.

"The scandal and the lack of response on systemic, institutional reforms is going to be a problem," said Aiossa. "It will be a main message for populist and far-right parties."

Eddy Wax, Louise Guillot and Aitor Hernández-Morales contributed reporting.