You Gotta Love It

November 27,2011

                                                

European lawmakers recently rejected Ireland’s nominee to the European Court of Auditors, according to an Associated Press report.

Reason:  He made a small miscalculation when he helped calculate Ireland’s national debt—3.6 billion Euros or $5 billion. The candidate, Kevin Cardiff, a senior servant in Ireland’s Finance Department, was endorsed by the Irish government for the $370,000 a year position. The Luxembourg-based court audits EU finances.

It seems Cardiff was deeply associated with Ireland’s ill-fated bank guarantee program that ended up costing 70 billion Euros to bail out six troubled Irish banks. The Budgetary Control Committee of the European Parliament in Brussels rejected Cardiff in a 12-11 vote, the first time a candidate has been turned away since the Court’s formation in 1975. Several lawmakers apparently informed Cardiff that they had received numerous emails from Ireland requesting that his nomination be blocked.

Switch quickly to the Obama administration. Though now, given the fallout from the MF Global meltdown, they will most probably try to deny it, the administration was highly considering appointing Jon Corzine as the next Treasury secretary of the US. But Corzine it appears will be spending at least part of his pre-Christmas holidays testifying before a senate subcommittee investigating MF Global’s sudden demise, Corzine’s abrupt resignation and what happened to $1.2 billion in customer funds.

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