It seems my earlier blog posts (1, 2, 3) about Citzalia, the virtual European Parliament game costing €275000, managed to put some thoughts into UKIP’s head, and specifically led to some questions to the EP’s administration asked by Godfrey Bloom MEP as reported by Gawain at England Expects.
The official response from Klaus Welle, Secretary General (i.e. highest civil servant) of the European Parliament, is that indeed there will be a budget of €275279 of which the Parliament will contribute €206450 – confirming the numbers I had dredged up with a bunch of bloggers previously.
The interesting new information from the Welle letter is that there seems to be no EP staffing money allocated to the project, meaning the danger that Citzalia operates in a virtual void is rather high.
Gawain,
I knew you would like that. 😉
Since I saw it coming from the hands of an ESN person (the company providing the service) I suppose it was provided by their side.
But I was kind of shocked, as you can imagine, that this was the kind of things that already been produced…
@Gawain – see my tweet and this, maybe they will send you one 🙂
Ron,
I am jealous. I wonder if they were funded by the EP or private stream.
G
This is becoming a “beautiful” story, worth following it up…
At least they have already produced USB-Keys in the form of Citzalia characters as I could witness at the PDF in Barcelona.