Official who exposed lax EU finances is suspended

Marta Andreasen, the European Commission's former chief accountant, who was at the centre of a bitter row after publicly comparing the EU's accounting standards to those of Enron, has been suspended.

Ms Andreasen, a Spaniard in her late forties, has been relieved of all her duties pending disciplinary proceedings, but remains on full pay. The Conservative MEP Chris Heaton-Harris condemned the move, saying: "This action shows how far the Commission are prepared to go to silence their critics."

Ms Andreasen said she learnt of her suspension only when she arrived for work yesterday and found she was barred from logging on to the Commission's computer system. "This morning I came into the office and could not access the system. I thought there was something wrong, but one hour later they came with a letter signed by the personnel and administration director."

A Commission spokesman said the decision was taken because of "the seriousness of the cumulative alleged breaches of the staff regulations by Ms Andreasen".

Ms Andreasen promised to continue her efforts to expose alleged accounting irregularities in the €100bn-a-year (£63bn) budget, which she claims make the European Union's finances impossible to track. "I have not gone through all of this to give up," she said.

In May Ms Andreasen was transferred to the Commission's personnel and administration department after she wrote to the Commission's president, Romano Prodi, and other senior officials venting her concerns about budget failures. She claimed the EU's accounts were "out of control".

The Commission, which has maintained since May that the practices she objects to were already well documented, and that she was hired to rectify them, said in a statement she was suspended for breaching staff regulations, including the failure to follow legitimate instructions from her superiors.

The EU's executive arm insisted it was implementing "sustained reforms" of its financial regulations. It said the suspension did not in any way prejudge the results of the disciplinary procedure. "Ms Andreasen remains on full pay and retains all her rights of defence under the staff regulations and in keeping with natural justice."

Ms Andreasen was appointed shortly after the mass resignation in 1999 of the Commission led by the former Luxembourg prime minister Jacques Santer after a previous whistleblowing scandal over corruption and failure to tackle fraud.

But her decision to go public on the detail of continuing flaws in the Commission's accounting system has brought her into conflict with Neil Kinnock, a Commission vice-president who is in charge of cleaning out nepotism and mismanagement in the Brussels bureaucracy. Mr Kinnock wrote to her last month saying he wanted to suspend her.

Ms Andreasen had said she was shocked to find that basic accounting standards, such as double-entry book-keeping, were not applied and that many members of staff in positions of financial responsibility or supervision were not trained accountants.

Paul Van Buitenen, the Commission official whose allegations brought down the Santer Commission in 1999, resigned last week, saying he was "bitterly disappointed" at the failure to improve financial probity since then.