Two corruption stories are moving through Brussels at once. They look unrelated - one is about foreign money buying influence, the other about EU money going missing. Together they describe a single, stubborn problem: the European Union is still not very good at policing the cash that runs through its own institutions.
Start with the case that pits Parliament against the courts. Belgian prosecutors have spent more than a year investigating whether lobbyists for the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei funnelled tens of thousands of euros to members of the European Parliament in exchange for support - including a letter backing the company's position. Police raided Huawei's EU office and lobbyists' homes across Belgium, Portugal and beyond; several people have been charged, and around 15 current and former MEPs have been drawn into the inquiry.
Then, in June 2026, Parliament did something that stopped the investigation cold: it voted to keep the immunity of four MEPs the Belgian authorities wanted to question. The legislature, in effect, blocked the judiciary. The move revived memories of Qatargate, the 2022 scandal in which cash and gifts from Qatar and Morocco allegedly bought influence inside the same institution - and it revived the same question. Can a Parliament investigate itself?
The second case runs on a parallel track. In late June 2026, the European Public Prosecutor's Office - the EU's own criminal-justice arm - carried out raids in four countries over the alleged misuse of EU funds by the Identity and Democracy group, the far-right bloc that sat in Parliament until 2024. Parliament's financial services put the wrongly spent sum at more than 4.3 million euros between 2019 and 2024. France's National Rally was among the targets.
The group's successor, Patriots for Europe - chaired by Jordan Bardella - has its own problem. Parliament found it had misspent almost 280,000 euros in 2024, on donations to non-EU bodies and contracts steered toward companies tied to national parties. When Parliament's budgetary-control committee declined to refer the matter to prosecutors in July, Transparency International EU filed its own complaint with the EPPO, arguing the money could not simply be quietly repaid.
The link is not the culprits - foreign lobbyists and fringe parties have little in common - but the plumbing. Both cases turn on the systems meant to keep money honest: the immunity rules that decide when an MEP can be questioned, the transparency register that tracks who is lobbying whom, the watchdogs and prosecutors who act only after the fact. Each scandal exposes a gap. Immunity can be used as a shield. Fund oversight catches misuse years late. And the register that is supposed to bring lobbying into the open remains contested, its scope and enforcement argued over even as the influence it tracks keeps flowing.
Qatargate was supposed to be the shock that fixed this. Parliament promised tighter rules, a stronger ethics regime, real consequences. Three years on, a Chinese bribery probe is stalled by the institution's own vote and prosecutors are chasing misspent millions through four countries. The pattern is what should worry EU citizens: not that corruption exists - it exists everywhere - but that the Union's defences keep arriving after the damage is done. An EU-level ethics body with teeth, faster immunity procedures and a transparency register that actually binds would not end wrongdoing. They would, at least, stop Brussels from looking like it is protecting itself first and the public second.
