Commission accounts. In the discharge procedure in 2003 the Commission promised comprehensive reform. At this stage the media began to investigate and to report. Andreasen went public with her concerns on 1 August 2002. Sacking Andreasen was fully suspended from her job by the Commission in May 2002 (for "violating Articles 12 and 21 of staff regulations, failure to show sufficient loyalty and respect"). She is said to have been suspended from her job and ultimately fired because she refused to sign accounts she believed were unreliable. Political career In 2007 Andreasen became the Treasurer of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which supported withdrawing the United Kingdom from the European Union. In the 2009 elections to the European Parliament she was elected as a UKIP member of the European Parliament for South East England and immediately joined the Parliament's influential Committee on Budgetary Control, although the European People's Party group blocked her bid to become a vice-chair of it. In September 2009, she resigned from her post as Treasurer of UKIP. In April 2010, Andreasen announced her intention to apply for the vacant position of Director-General of the European Anti-fraud Office (OLAF), but there was no subsequent report that she had actually sent in such an application. After what she considered a disappointing election result for UKIP in the local elections of May 2011, Andreasen called for her leader Nigel Farage to resign. The party responded that it had made gains in the election and that her statement "displays what one might perhaps charitably call a naivety in its analysis of the UK electoral scene". During a TV interview, Farage himself responded that Andreasen was out of touch and "didn't know what she was talking about". In November 2011, she told RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland that the Irish government's nomination of Kevin Cardiff to the European Court of Auditors should be withdrawn. In February 2013, she defected from UKIP to the Conservative Party, describing leader Nigel Farage as "a Stalinist" who was "anti-women". She lost her seat at the 2014 election. See also Accountability in the European Union List of books on European Union Paul van Buitenen Resignation of the Santer Commission Whistleblower References Bibliography Marta Andreasen: Brussels Laid Bare, St Edwards Press, 2009. . External links 1954 births Living people Political office-holders of the European Union Spanish whistleblowers Political corruption 21st-century women MEPs for England UK Independence