Frontex Chief Leggeri resigns

Frontex Chief Leggeri resigns

The director general of the EU border protection agency Frontex, Fabrice Leggeri, resigns. A corresponding report from the online magazine “Politico.eu” was confirmed to the FAZ on Friday by informed circles. Thus, the 54-year-old Frenchman made his decision on Thursday night and informed the EU Commission about it after being heard by the Agency’s Management Board in an investigation report by the EU Anti-Fraud Office, OLAF. In a letter to the chairman of the board of directors, Alexandre Frei, from the Federal Police, he asked for his resignation to be accepted. The decision should be announced in the early afternoon, when the board of directors has concluded its meeting. In addition to the EU Commission, the governing board of the EU’s highest authority mainly includes representatives of member states.

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Thomas Gutschker

Political correspondent for the European Union, NATO and Benelux countries based in Brussels.

In December 2020, OLAF investigators searched Leggeri’s office at Frontex’s Warsaw headquarters, as well as the office of his chief of staff, Thibauld de la Haye Jousselin. The starting point for this was employees’ internal complaints about personnel management and agency management. It is said that there was no direct connection to the allegations of resistance against Frontex. But an indirect one, because Leggeri was accused of intimidating employees of the fundamental rights unit, responsible for the internal control of operations. Following the investigation, OLAF produced an investigation report which is said to be over 200 pages long, including annexes, but which so far is known only to a small circle. It has not yet been referred to the European Parliament’s home affairs committee, which is investigating the allegations against Frontex. In informed circles, it was said that a total of three people would be charged, including Leggeri and his chief of staff. He also resigns.


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Leggeri, who has led Frontex since 2015, has been under political pressure since reports in November 2000 of cases of migrants being illegally returned by border guards in the Aegean. These allegations mainly affected the Greek coast guard, but Frontex was suspected of at least looking the other way, if not actively participating. In the hearings at the interior commission, Leggeri was involved in contradictions, the internal documents were only released in slices. When in doubt, the Executive Director always referred to the fact that his authority had no mandate to control the Greek Coast Guard. This was the case again recently, when allegations surfaced that illegal denials had been hidden in an authority’s internal database.

The Frontex Management Board investigated 13 suspected cases in an internal investigation. In eight cases, he failed to identify any violations of the law. The March 2021 final report stated that five other cases were not “completely clarified beyond any reasonable doubt”. There was no evidence that the migrants were not brought back safely by the Turkish coast guard or reached the Greek coast safely. The board of directors warned that the system for reporting incidents during border protection operations must be reformed. He also urged Leggeri to hire forty fundamental rights inspectors, provided for in the agency’s personnel plan; the director failed to do this for months.

In June last year, the European Court of Auditors confirmed that Frontex had serious organizational deficits. “Silo structures” prevailed there, departments did not communicate with each other. “This is clearly the exception, not the rule, when we check EU authorities,” authority chairman Klaus-Heiner Lehne told the FAZ. In October 2021, the European Parliament froze part of Frontex’s 2022 budget, 90 million to 750 million euros, and linked the release to organizational reforms.


Leggeri was invited to resign for a long time by the political left. His relationship with EU Interior Commissioner Ylva Johansson was strained; she has repeatedly publicly distanced herself from the French. Ultimately, however, he was able to stay in office because member states advocated a tougher course towards “boat refugees”. Leggeri himself referred to EU law that allows these boats to be arrested or forced to change course if they are not in danger. What brought him down were mainly mistakes in the management of authority and obvious weaknesses in dealing with claims of backsliding.