The European Commission has never fully recovered from the corruption scandal that forced its then members to resign en masse in 1999. Stories of false contracts, lax financial controls, complacency and cronyism crystallised much of the public distrust of the "Brussels bureaucracy". Romano Prodi, who took over as head of the commission later that year, promised that henceforth there would be "zero tolerance" of corruption. But now a new scandal has broken, containing several of the elements that brought down the Santer commission four years ago.
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