The office of Belgium’s federal prosecutor says police searched the residence and offices of a European Parliament employee Wednesday as part of its probe into a suspected Russian interference campaign to pay EU lawmakers to promote Russian propaganda.
In April, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo announced the country’s intelligence service had uncovered the existence of a network trying to undermine support for Ukraine.
The prosecutor’s office said the searches conducted Wednesday “are part of a case of interference, passive corruption and membership of a criminal organization and relates to indications of Russian interference, whereby Members of the European Parliament were approached and paid to promote Russian propaganda via the Voice of Europe news website.”
The European Parliament employee under investigation is reported to be Guillaume Pradoura, who works for EU lawmaker Marcel de Graaff of the far-right Dutch party Forum for Democracy. Pradours’ home in Brussels and his parliamentary offices in Brussels and in Strasbourg, where the EU Parliament’s offices are located in France, were also searched.
"For me, all this comes as a complete surprise," de Graaff said on X. “I have no involvement in any so-called Russian disinformation operation whatsoever. I have my own political beliefs and I proclaim them. That is my job as an MEP."
An Agence France-Presse source who is close to the Belgian probe told the news agency that Belgium’s investigation is more focused on the employee’s former employer than his present one.
Pradours’ former employer was controversial German lawmaker Maximilian Krah, already under suspicion for his ties to Russia and China, after one of his aides was arrested on accusations of spying for China.
Krah is the far-right Alternative for Germany’s top candidate in June’s Europe-wide election for a new parliament, but his party has banned him from campaigning.
A spokesperson for Krah told Agence France-Presse that Pradours had not worked in the lawmaker’s office for two years. “We assume that we are not affected,” he said.
The European Parliament's hard-right Identity and Democracy Group, or ID, recently expelled Germany's Alternative for Germany, or AfD, delegation, led by Krah.
Krah said in a recent interview published in an Italian newspaper that he would not say that “anyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal." He was referring to the much-feared Nazi Schutzstaffel, the black-uniformed elite guards of Nazi Germany.
Krah's SS statement, along with other behaviors, were too much for some other far-right groups in the European Parliament. ID said in a statement that it "no longer wants to be associated with the incidents.”
