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Charles Michel is under fire after nearly quadrupling the European Council’s travel budget by flying around the world on private planes.
The prime minister spent more than a quarter of his current annual budget of £1.7m last year on an ill-advised trip to meet Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, in Beijing.
Last year, the European Union’s top official booked taxpayer-funded “air taxis” to ferry himself and his army of aides, press officers and photographers around the planet.
That included traveling separately from European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen on a private jet to an environment summit in Brest, northwestern France, because the two were embroiled in a bitter feud.
To help pay for its expensive private flying habit, Brussels has been forced to increase its travel spending to £2.2m this year, a 26% increase on its spending for 2024.
Eager to boost his reputation on the world stage, Michel, the former Belgian prime minister, has already spent around four times as much as his predecessors, Donald Tusk and Herman Van Rompuy, whose costs have not exceeded £440,000 each.
“Charles Michel is attached to status, private planes and big cars,” a diplomat told respected French newspaper Le Monde. “His travel dossier reads like ‘Around the World in 80 Private Jets’,” joked a second source to The Telegraph.
Cristian Terhes, Romanian MEP, said: “Charles Michel, the former prime minister of a small European state, now seems addicted to taxpayer-funded junkets. It’s very difficult to justify this huge jump in corporate spending by him on foreign travel. Clearly it does a lot of good for his ego, but much less for the member states of the European Union.
“This gives wings to the axiom that the EU is a racket for taking money from taxpayers and handing it over to politicians and their friends.”
His overseas “missions” using private transport have included trips to China, Turkey, Egypt and the United Kingdom. EU rules allow its top officials to fly privately if other commercial routes are not viable, but the guidelines are often ignored.
The trip to Beijing, criticized by Berlin and Paris at the time, raised considerable eyebrows after spending more than £405,000 to accept an invitation from Xi Jinping in December 2022.
Michel’s team argued that the trip was necessary to avoid becoming embroiled in China’s draconian coronavirus rules.
“A commercial flight could not be booked due to Covid regulations in China, which would have required the president and his delegation to be quarantined for two weeks,” his office explained.
The prime minister also favors private flights to destinations that are more accessible and well served by commercial routes from Brussels.
In January last year, he chartered an £18,000 jet from Luxavation, the company that holds the EU’s contract for private jets, to meet with Chancellor Karl Nehammer in Austria. A month later, Mr Michel spent £33,000 flying to Berlin to meet German leader Olaf Scholz.
The top Eurocrat used Luxavation to attend a dinner in Paris, costing around £30,000, despite the journey being an hour by train from the Belgian capital. And each time he has attended the European Parliament in Strasbourg, he has spent between £10,000 and £30,000 on five private jet trips.
Despite private planes being seen as bad for the environment, Mr Michel shared a jet with Ms von der Leyen at the Cop27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh last November, costing around £100,000.
A spokesman for Michel said many of the trips abroad, which are normally the work of national leaders in the bloc, were necessary to build international relations because of the war in Ukraine.
“We need to explain our sanctions against Moscow to third countries and fight against Putin’s narrative that they are responsible for inflation,” the official added.
