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Hans-Peter Martin


Hans-Peter Martin (born August 11, 1957) is an Austrian journalist and politician who has been a Member of the European Parliament since 1999.

Born in Bregenz, Vorarlberg, Martin worked for the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel. As a freelance writer, he has written and co-authored several popular books, among them the best-selling The Global Trap: Globalization and the Assault on Prosperity and Democracy (Die Globalisierungsfalle, 1996), Bitter Pills (Bittere Pillen) about the pros and cons of pharmaceuticals and The European Trap (Die Europafalle, only available in German but a partial translation is available on Martin's website), an inside analysis of European integration, faults of the European bureaucracy and lobbyism in the EU.

In the 1999 European Parliament elections Martin was selected as leader of the Social Democratic Party of Austria's group. However, differences with the party's leadership led to his complete break with the SPÖ.

Since then Martin has been reelected twice through his independent candidate list, Hans-Peter Martin's List.

Early in 2004, he accused MEPs of all parties of falsely claiming reimbursement of travel and subsistence expenses. He produced evidence of MEP's signing the register in the morning to receive their daily allowance, and then immediately leaving the building. Broadcast on German TV, the accusations caused an uproar. The then European Parliament spokesman Hans Gert Pöttering dismissed Martin's accusations as unnecessarily aggressive and the President of the Parliament Pat Cox said that he would have preferred to deal with the case internally.


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