European Parliament dismisses Vice President Eva Kaili, accused of accepting bribes from Qatar

The plenary session of the European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday in favor of the dismissal as vice president of the Greek socialist MEP Eva Kaili, accused of corruption and money laundering by a Belgian judge in the case of alleged bribery from Qatar known as

.

The investigation of the plot, which has shaken the European legislature in a way that has not happened for a long time, can still yield names of new possible implicates.

Kaili has already been expelled from her party in Greece (Pasok) and from the group of Socialists and Democrats (S&D), to which she belonged in Brussels.

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Meeting in their last plenary session of the year in Strasbourg, the parliamentarians easily passed the two-thirds majority required to strip Kaili of all her charges, formally charged since Sunday and in pretrial detention since Friday.

Of the MEPs present in the Chamber in Strasbourg, 625 voted in favor of dismissing Kaili, one against and there were two abstentions.

The Greek, however, will continue to be an MEP since the European Parliament cannot remove a seat if the interested party does not resign, which in any case has not yet been sentenced by justice.

The Conference of Presidents of the political groups met first thing in the morning and approved "unanimously" to start the impeachment process, according to the president of Parliament, Roberta Metsola, who put the vote as the first item on the agenda.

The speed of a process that can take several days, but has been completed in just a few hours, shows the concern that this case has aroused in the European Parliament and in the other European institutions, which have been quick to promise improvements in terms of transparency and “integrity” of the governing bodies of the EU.

Metsola herself, who has not been able to hide her "anger" these days over a scandal that has broken out in the final stretch of a mandate that she has always claimed to dedicate to the fight against corruption, has stated these days that "there will be no impunity" some in his Parliament and has announced an internal investigation, the details of which are yet to be known.

In fact, although the majority of the political groups have been in favor of this process, there are divergences about the timing: while the Left and the Greens demand its immediate start, others such as Renew or the European People's Party (EPP) advocate waiting to finish the judicial investigations first so as not to interfere in the process and have legal clarity —and about the final number of those involved— before beginning the internal purge.

“It would be a mistake to get ahead of ourselves and replace the judiciary in this task,” Renew president Stéphane Sejourné said before the vote.

The issue will be dealt with in the debate also proposed for this Tuesday in plenary session on "suspicions of corruption in Qatar and the need for transparency and accountability in the European institutions", as requested by several European groups.

A resolution in this regard, with some concrete measures, will be voted on Thursday.

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