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European Parliament President Roberta Metsola missed a lawmakers’ deadline for disclosing a luxurious free trip — including a sumptuous dinner and a €350 hotel room for herself and her husband — all paid for by an elite wine society, POLITICO can reveal.
In October last year, Metsola traveled to Burgundy, a famous wine region of France, to take up an honorary position as a “dame” of a wine-drinking brotherhood called the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, at a five-course dinner in a medieval castle.
The brotherhood paid for Metsola’s stay at the five-star Hôtel Le Cep, in a room that POLITICO has discovered cost €349 for the night, plus tax. This is not against any of the Parliament’s internal rules but MEPs have until the end of the following month to publicly declare any travel, accommodation or stipends paid for by third parties, such as governments or NGOs.
The night in the hotel took place October 22 last year, but Metsola made her declaration on the Parliament’s website on January 11 this year, long after the deadline for MEPs had passed.
When asked by POLITICO in an interview if she has infringed rules that all MEPs must comply with, Metsola said: “As president of the Parliament, no. But if you want me to say whether from now on every time I go anywhere for anything, will I do it [declare the trip] as soon as security protocol considerations are through, I will do that.”
Metsola and the Parliament’s spokesperson argue that she is not covered by the same rules as the other members of the 705-seat chamber when it comes to publicly declaring trips.
EU Parliament spokesperson Jaume Duch told POLITICO: “While these things have never previously been declared by Parliament’s presidents, President Metsola has chosen to do so in an unprecedented move to boost transparency and lead by positive example.” He said that no travel expenses were ever paid for by a third party.
“Her travel by car was paid for and arranged by the European Parliament for security reasons, as is the case whenever the president travels,” another EU official said.
German Green MEP Daniel Freund told POLITICO that the Parliament should hold an amnesty in the coming days for late declarations of sponsored trips.
“I’m happy that Metsola goes fully transparent on her sponsored trips. As the president, she’s setting an example — especially when it comes to ethical rules. Her declarations come late,” Freund said.
He added: “Every MEP should have a chance to catch up on their declarations in the next days. But after that, transparency rules must be taken seriously and misdeeds must be sanctioned.”
The wine lobby carries considerable clout in France and in Brussels, as wine is a lucrative export and central to the bloc’s trade policy.
The EU spends millions to promote sales of European wines outside the bloc each year, protects them from intellectual property theft under its system of geographical indications and subsidizes winegrowers through the Common Agricultural Policy.
The EU official defended Metsola’s decision to attend the brotherhood event, which her official record stated involved her “induction as a dame of the organization.”
“It’s European gastronomy and this is something she is proud to promote,” said the EU official, adding that the title conferred upon her involved carrying out “zero” activity. “If that makes her the object of ridicule, I can assure you its intention was simply to show everybody you can be open with everything,” the EU official said.
As Metsola attempts to push through reforms to the Parliament’s transparency procedures, her own track record of declarations is coming under greater scrutiny.
On Thursday, POLITICO revealed that she had logged 142 gifts in a public register, breaking with years of parliamentary practice — but also missing a deadline that the written rulebook says should apply to her. Metsola and her team have vehemently rejected the idea that she broke any rules.
She told POLITICO that her “appeal” was that those who make an effort to be more transparent should not be punished for doing so. “What I don’t want, and this is also an appeal, and this is also coming from a lot of colleagues, is that those who actually declared [gifts] are sometimes the focus rather than those who didn’t,” the Maltese politician said.
The sharper focus on transparency and integrity at the Parliament in the wake of the Qatargate corruption scandal is also shining a light on sponsored trips by other MEPs.
Over 200 individual trips where accommodation, travel or both were paid for by a third party have been declared by MEPs since the start of the current legislature in 2019, according to an analysis seen by POLITICO. The locations of these trips include many non-democratic countries such as Venezuela, the United Arab Emirates, China, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Syria.
Bacchic feasting
Founded in 1934, the Tastevin brotherhood states that its mission is to protect the reputation of Burgundy wine and revive “old Bacchic confraternities” from the 17th and 18th century. Bacchus was the ancient Roman god of wine and festivity.
“We welcomed her as a wine lover and in her capacity of president of the EP,” the brotherhood’s Quartermaster Arnaud Orsel told POLITICO, adding that it was a great “honor” to host her. Orsel and hotel staff also confirmed that Metsola’s husband accompanied her during the trip.
The brotherhood served five courses paired with wine at the dinner. The menu included the typically Burgundian poached eggs in a meurette sauce made of red wine, with lardons, mushroom and onion. There are some 12,000 members of the club.
In 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron and then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel became “grand officers” of the brotherhood, a higher rank than dame, Orsel said. No lesser European figure than Charles de Gaulle, France’s wartime resistance leader and later president, was also a member of the Tastevin fraternity.
Over three days last week, Metsola registered three other trips where accommodation was covered by a third party, all of which were notified long after the required deadline.
They are: one night in a hotel in Copenhagen to deliver a keynote speech at a conference on democracy paid for by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation; two nights in a hotel in Jerusalem while on a state visit to Israel paid for by the Israeli government; one night in a hotel in Davos, Switzerland to attend a breakfast meeting attended by Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, paid for by a charity called the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.
Metsola also declared attending the UEFA Champions League final in Paris last May as a guest of honor. A spokesperson for UEFA said the fact that a decision to relocate the final from Russia to France out of solidarity with Ukraine was “central” to Metsola’s decision to attend.
The Parliament president on January 15 updated her declaration of financial interests to mention for the first time that she was an unpaid trustee on the board of the EU-funded think tank Friends of Europe.
According to a spokesperson for Friends of Europe, the next day — January 16 — Metsola resigned from this role, which she had taken up in June 2020. She became president of the Parliament in January 2022. Duch, the spokesperson of the Parliament, confirmed that she is no longer a trustee.
Metsola has remained as an unpaid member of the executive board of the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, the official think tank of her center-right European People’s Party. She declared her involvement with the think tank on the Parliament’s website on January 12.
