For 2012, inflation of large salaries in the diplo service (Maj)
(BRUSSELS2) While the time is rather for budgetary restrictions, the 2012 draft budget of the European diplomatic service (EEAS) placed under the authority of the Briton Catherine Ashton ignores it, at least at certain levels of the hierarchy. While the number of statutory staff is almost stable: +7 posts (the workforce increasing from 1643 to 1670 divided into 940 administrators and 730 assistant posts), the top of the scale is experiencing double-digit inflation.
+ 40 new high salaries
While the number of AD 16s and AD15s remains unchanged (12 and 38 respectively), the same is not true of the following categories: the AD 14s are experiencing significant inflation (they rise from 70 to 109, i.e. +39 posts or +56%) in the draft 2012 budget. communicating vessels with AD 13.
It should be noted that an AD 14 provides (excluding family allowances and expatriation bonuses) between 13.200 and 15.000 euros to his agent. And that an AD 13 earns from 11.700 to 13.200 euros, i.e. between 1300 and 1500 euros more than an AD 12. Reduced to an annual rate, this inflation of high salaries represents 7,5 million euros... Which is not negligible and represents a quarter of the increase requested for the 2012 budget. EEAS; it is a question of compensating for this arrival of new "high salaries".
Member States' double talk
This increase is, in fact, made necessary for two main reasons. Firstly, the organization chart of the EEAS, where special advisers, special representatives, directors of departments, directors general, directors are superimposed is particularly dense; it looks more like a millefeuille, where there are more senior executives than effective executives. If we include the 185 AD 12 planned for 2012, we thus arrive at more than 550 civil servants who, in the diplomatic service, earn more than 10.000 euros per month. A real Mexican army...
Secondly, and above all, this increase is due to the recruitment of ambassadors from member states who demand to be better paid or not to lose their benefits from their member states. Moreover, it does not matter if this is in contradiction with the request of the same Member States to limit, or even contract, European budgets. Here we find a fairly common doublespeak of the Member States who want to see the resources of the Community institutions diminish but at the same time ask them to spend more...
NB: The overall budget of the EEAS planned for 2012 is 490,8 million euros against 464,1 million in 2011, an increase which seems significant in percentage (5,8%), but remains all in all very modest in numerical terms (+ 26 million euros). Staff costs (statutory, contractual and other costs) did not increase, significantly at headquarters (+ 3 million euros, the budget going from 140,2 M to 143 M) but a little more in the delegations (+ 13 M, from 168,3 M to 181 M).