A British spy chief who heads Europe’s FBI equivalent has benefited from thousands of pounds in allowances to cover his children’s school fees, vacations and family accommodation, Heat Street can reveal.
Rob Wainwright, who is campaigning openly for Britain to stay in the EU, runs Europol, the European crime and counter-terrorism agency which failed to stop the Paris and Brussels terror attacks.
New figures seen by Heat Street confirm Europol’s annual budget has rocketed to a record €100 million – a rise of €16 million in just two years.
Its staff has also doubled to more than 900 in the last decade:
Enforcing cooperation between @EU_CEPOL and @Europol https://t.co/AVKKbKXUa5 #lawenforcement #police pic.twitter.com/2Yk2fXR2v3
— Europol (@Europol) April 15, 2016
This year’s budget will pay €2 million euros to Europol employees for their children’s education, €5 million for family allowances, €750,000 for vacations, and €90,000 on social events.
Another €23,500 has been earmarked for uniforms – even though the army of Hague-based Europol officers have no powers of arrest.
Wainwright, appointed Europol director seven years ago from the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency, is paid around €16,000 a month – a salary equivalent to the British Prime Minister.
He is understood to have accepted generous allowances and perks for his children’s education, family accommodation and travel during that time.
Europol has been savaged by police experts, including the former head of the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terror unit.
Despite claims the ineffectual force is a “platform” for intelligence sharing between European agencies, Europol and its associated agencies have been riven by a series deadly security breaches.
Pleased to receive the visit of Wolfgang #Brandstetter, Austrian Minister of Justice, at @Europol today @AustriainNL pic.twitter.com/4j0r8EBc5s
— Europol (@Europol) April 20, 2016
In the last year intelligence sharing failures between French, Belgian, Dutch, German and Turkish security agencies let ISIS terrorists exploit weakness to carry out a succession of bombings and shootings in Paris and Brussels, killing scores of people.
Turkey said it warned Belgium and Holland about Brussels bomber Ibrahim El Bakraoui.
Belgium was told that Ibrahim El Bakraoui was a suspected IS fighter last summer but failed to register the concerns on any EU terror watch list. It meant that the jihadi, who killed 14 in an airport suicide bomb, was free to travel across Europe.
Although Europol claims there are 5,000 EU citizens who have been to Syria, fewer than a third of the names are on their terror watchlist.
Wainwright has recently waded into the heated debate over Brexit by arguing to keep Britain in Europe, claiming counter-terror operations would cost more and be less effective outside of the EU.
His stance is complicated by the fact that Britain was not, for instance, told about El Bakraoui, sparking concern that the UK is in the dark about other dangerous figures.
But Wainwright conceded last week that he did not know how many terror cells the Islamic State had sent to Europe to carry out atrocities.
A Europol spokesman claimed the agency’s work is “crucial” with terror on the rise, citing an ever-growing case load.
But experts doubt whether all that effort actually helps fight crime.
Robin Simcox, a national security expert with Washington-based Heritage Foundation, told Heat Street: “I’m dubious of the ability of organisations like Europol to be particularly effective. I think to expect otherwise relies on a state willingness to share secrets that there is no historical precedent for.
“They can also only ever be as competent as individual nations allow them to be.
“If a certain country’s intelligence sharing procedures are dysfunctional internally – which it seems reasonably clear to me is the case in Belgium, say – then it stands to reason that it can’t be that effective at an international level either.”
