Thursday, September 19, 2024

Power for Sale: inside Europe’s Qatargate scandal

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Untold, the investigative FT podcast delving into hidden controversies by hearing from the people at the heart of the story, is back with a second season.

In Untold: Power for Sale, host Valentina Pop and a team of FT  correspondents from all over Europe investigate the Qatargate scandal, in which EU lawmakers were arrested and accused of accepting payments from Qatar in exchange for political influence.

Never before had there been anything like this at the parliament. But while unprecedented, very little came of the investigation. Within four months, all the suspects were released, and the case is still pending.

Why were members of parliament accused of taking bribes? Is the European parliament rotten, or was it just a few bad apples? And how many more scandals will it take for the EU to clean up its act?

Power for Sale is a four-part series. You can listen to the first two episodes here, and tune in on Wednesday June 5 for the final instalments.

Subscribe and listen on: Apple PodcastsSpotifyPocket Casts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Listen to Episode 1: ‘Bags full of money’:

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

Listen to Episode 2: Ocean’s Eleven:

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

Listen to the trailer:

Valentina Pop is the FT’s Europe news editor in London. She previously commissioned, wrote and edited the FT’s daily newsletter Europe Express. A polyglot journalist of Romanian extraction, she was a Brussels correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and also had postings in Berlin, Washington and Bucharest.

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