In recent months, the Parliament has been busy reviewing the Commission's proposal to reform the rules that govern EU officials' terms and conditions. There is a fairly widely-held view amongst the institutions that EU staff must not be excluded from the wider austerity measures which are simultaneously being implemented within member states.
Yet, amongst the proposals for longer working hours and a delayed retirement age, the Commission could also have chosen to tighten up the ethics rules which govern the 50,000+ staff working at the Commission, Parliament, agencies and other EU institutions. Yet the Commission chose to ignore this opportunity when it published its proposal.
Luckily MEPs have been more thoughtful, introducing amendments to better regulate the revolving door, as well as on other important topics such as protecting whistleblowers. These revolving door amendments would ban EU officials from going on a sabbatical to become a lobbyist, as well as introducing a one year cooling-off period to prevent senior officials from becoming lobbyists after they leave office. While these amendments are not perfect, and loopholes would still remain, they are a step in the right direction and encouragingly, were tabled by groups across the political spectrum, including the European People's Party, the Greens and the Liberals. In the latest development, the Legal Affairs committee voted in favour of amendments on this issue.
Now it looks as if the whole proposal for reform of the staff rules will be put on the back-burner as the Council (member states) tries to develop a common position on this dossier. Undoubtedly this is not easy, considering the different approaches to employment rights, wage-setting and austerity across the EU. How the Council will react to the revolving doors amendments is also not clear, but surely it is not inconceivable that amendments aimed at improving ethics and transparency in Brussels would play well with domestic audiences.
What is clear from the evidence collected by the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU) and Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) is that the EU's ethics rules are overdue a revamp. Both ALTER-EU's report and CEO's RevolvingDoorWatch highlight cases where the EU institutions have failed to take the issue of the revolving door seriously, leaving open the risk that officials and former officials will provoke conflicts of interests when they go through the revolving door between the EU institutions and the lobby industry.
Even if it is many months before the new rules are finalised via the tripartite Parliament-Council-Commission process, the EU institutions could do much more right now to effectively implement the revolving door rules that are already in place.
The Commission has told ALTER-EU that its revolving door campaign “shows that in a few cases, former members of staff, in particular contract agents, did not comply with their obligations to inform the Institution in due time [of their new proposed activities, in order to seek approval]. The Commission is therefore willing to continue and increase its awareness-raising activities.
It is good that the Commission finally acknowledges that there are gaps in how staff are informed and reminded of their obligations. CEO has tabled a series of access to documents requests to nine different Commission DGs (directorates) to ask about the briefing materials they provide to staff about how they should handle ethics and potential conflicts of interest. The responses have revealed a very mixed picture. Some DGs wholly rely on the materials that DG Human Resources (the lead DG in this area) provides; others produce their own guides. Ironically, DG Human Resources could learn something from some of these other DGs which appear to provide more detailed explanations of the revolving door rules and how they should be interpreted.
But this is not just about getting staff to apply under the rules. Even more importantly, the Commission should effectively implement the rules when it looks at applications. The Commission has the right to forbid officials from undertaking future work which could provoke a conflict of interest – yet they have chosen to do this only once in the past four years, among more than 340 applications. And with no clear definition in use of what constitutes a conflict of interest, this is perhaps not surprising.
The Commission, and other EU institutions, could usefully look at the US rules where federal officials are banned entirely from 'switching sides' to lobby on the specific issues they worked on and are banned for two years from working on a broader range of issues.
Some might think that all this seems technical, nerdy and bureaucratic - but surely this is a small price to pay to better regulate the revolving door between the EU's 50,000+ staff and Brussels' 15,000+ lobbyists?
Friday, 1 June 2012
MEPs call for curbs on the revolving door
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
The diplomatic door-openers
In her Survival guide to EU lobbying Caroline De Cock, an experienced EU lobbyist, calls senior ex-officials who go through the revolving door into commercial lobbying “door-openers” and she writes “They can be of great value, by opening the door to people and offices that would otherwise remain unattainable to your lobbying efforts”.
There can be few more effective door-openers than former European member state diplomats who have been tirelessly working in the Brussels bubble for years, often decades. Representing your country at the EU level brings you into close contact with member state colleagues in the European Council, as well as with senior officials at the Commission and other EU institutions. You can develop an extensive contact book, an insider's knowledge of how the EU system works, as well as the authority and influence which comes from using the title 'Ambassador'.
Take the case of Tibor Kiss, for example who “was instrumental in Hungary's successful accession to the EU and its preparations for hosting the EU Presidency in 2011”. He headed and managed the largest representation of Hungary abroad and “acquired a profound insight into EU policies and institutions, including the challenges of inter-institutional cooperation, political communication and counselling.” He was a diplomat for over 20 years representing Hungary at the European level and in November 2011, he moved to the lobby consultancy PA Europe as a senior policy adviser.
As PA Europe said when he joined them “Through his work in Council and Coreper Ambassador Kiss knows the main dossiers, the leading persons as well as the national and institutional stakeholders’ positions. His personal insights and profound knowledge of the way Brussels works will be a great asset to PA and its clients”.
Or the case of Jean De Ruyt who until recently was Belgium's Ambassador to the EU, including during their 2010 Presidency of the European Council. He was closely involved in Europe’s response to the financial crisis and the resulting legislation at the European level, and he also facilitated the resolution of a variety of state aid and competition policy disputes for Belgian companies. Now he has joined Covington & Burling LLP, a law firm, with a side-line in European advocacy and lobbying.
Upon his appointment, Covington & Burling said: “Jean is a tremendous addition to Covington’s existing government affairs capabilities in Europe and internationally. His knowledge of the European institutions and the complex interplay between EU, UN and US policies and his strategic insights on complex matters are second to none and we are confident his arrival will significantly support our legal team and will be welcomed by many of our clients.”
As former EU ambassadors from member states, the revolving door rules contained in the EU Staff Regulations did not apply to either Ambassador Kiss or Ambassador De Ruyt and this illustrates the need for the European Council and member states to take the revolving door problem seriously and to develop their own rules governing it.
Meanwhile, the UK's own revolving door rules for ministers and for civil servants only cover outgoing civil servants and not incoming. Thus Ivan Rogers who recently joined Prime Minister David Cameron's 10 Downing Street team as adviser on Europe after five years working in the UK finance sector at Barclays Capital and Citigroup, was apparently unregulated under the existing revolving door rules.
By contrast, the EU's own ambassadors overseas are covered by EU staff revolving door rules. So John Bruton, who was EU ambassador to the US for five years until November 2009 did have to apply for permission to join lobby consultancy Cabinet DN and to undertake his various other subsequent external activities. Yet the evidence implies that the Commission is not as proactive as it should be to ensure the rules are followed by its staff and former staff. John Bruton has written on his own website that "Last December [2010] it was brought to my attention by the Commission that, under their rules, I ought to have sought their consent for any professional activities I undertook in the two years after I ceased to be in their employment. I was unaware of this requirement, as it had not been brought to my attention by the Commission either in the discussions that took place before I accepted the post in 2004, or at any time thereafter until December 2010. While I was aware that such requirements applied to former Commissioners, I was not aware that it applied to persons in my position.”
All in all this is a situation which needs to change. These former ambassadors turned lobbyists require effective regulation of their moves through the revolving door, whether they have worked on behalf of the EU or their own member state, in order to prevent the risk of conflicts of interest from occurring. The ball is in the court of the Commission, the European Council and member states themselves to regulate these diplomatic door-openers.
Check out RevolvingDoorWatch to see further evidence of how the EU institutions need to better regulate the revolving door.
The EU institutions are not transparent about the revolving door. If you have information about other revolving door cases, please contact: revolvingdoorwatch@corporateeurope.org
Tuesday, 21 February 2012
Pro-ACTA lobbies fail on transparency
The European Parliament is facing heavy lobbying in the run-up to a crucial vote on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Industry lobby groups are stepping up the pressure to make MEPs vote in favour of this global treaty which has come under heavy criticism from civil society.
Almost 2,4 million people signed an Avaaz petition against ACTA, which they fear “could allow corporations to censor the Internet”. This agreement, the petition explains, would “allow private interests to police everything that we do online and impose massive penalties - even prison sentences - against people they say have harmed their business”.
Last week a coalition of 75 industry lobby groups, mainly from sectors such as the music, publishing and film industries, sent a letter to all MEPs, asking them to support ACTA “for the good of Europe”. The lobby groups, representing thousands of European companies who say they are “dependent on intellectual property”, warn that failing to ratify ACTA can “irrevocably affect Europe’s credibility as a trusted global trade partner”.
They call for “a calm and reasoned assessment of the facts rather than the misinformation circulating”. This reaction seems to reflect a nervousness about the fact that there is now finally an open democratic debate about ACTA.
The negotiations that led to the agreement were secretive and deeply undemocratic, with big business lobby groups enjoying generous access while other interests were excluded. And new research by Corporate Europe Observatory shows that the lobbying by the coalition of 75 does also not live up to basic standards of transparency.
Sixty per cent of the industry groups signing the letter to MEPs (45 out of 75) are not even registered as interest representatives in the EU’s Transparency Register. Moreover, among the 30 groups which are registered, six fail to declare how many lobbyists they employ. And the Global Anti-Counterfeiting Group (GACG) absurdly claims that its expenses on lobbying in the financial year 2009 to 2010 were zero euros!
In the register, GACG explains its representation of interests sometimes is done in a voluntary basis and in other cases, costs are borne by the groups affiliated to GACG, but wherever the money comes from, as a lobby group, it should specify how much it spends. This appears to be a clear example of a misleading registration, violating the EU’s Code of Conduct for lobbyists.
Based on the data disclosed in the Transparency Register by the minority in the pro-ACTA coalition that are registered, it can be concluded that they employ at least 93 in-house lobbyists (19 of them with a permanent access pass to the EP) and that they spend around 7 395 000 euros a year on lobbying the EU institutions. It is clearly a very well-resourced lobby that is pushing for ACTA right now.
In the last weeks, demonstrations against the proposed treaty have been held in several cities across the EU and the Avaaz petition also confirms that there are strong concerns among citizens. Some MEPs have already express their position against ACTA as a threat to civil liberties; the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, has said it is not good “in its current form”. The next weeks in the run-up to the Parliament’s vote on ACTA will show whether citizens or big business will win this important battle.
See the full list of organisations and info provided in the register.
Friday, 10 February 2012
A once in a decade opportunity
You've probably never heard of the 'Staff Regulations of Officials of the European Communities' but this 150-page tome and its associated annexes constitute 'The Bible' of terms of conditions for the 50,000 plus staff who work across the EU institutions and agencies. It also sets out the ethical obligations for staff including around confidentiality and handling conflicts of interest.
This document is currently the subject of a heated debate between staff trade unions and the Commission as it is up for review, and both the Council and the Commission want to see European officials sharing the austerity being experienced across the member states.
Just before Christmas, the Commission published its proposals for reforming the Staff Regulations. It wants staff levels to be cut by five per cent, staff to work a longer week, the retirement age to be extended, and some lower-ranked staff to receive a reduced salary. Not surprisingly, staff trade unions have a lot to say about this agenda, on behalf of their members. And while the stereotype of a bloated Brussels bureaucracy needing to be cut down to size might play well in the right-wing media, the Commission's 30,000 staff is actually smaller than some member states' government departments. Compared to the wide range of lawmaking and policy-making tasks which the Commission has been given, the number of staff is even on the low side.
Aside from the thorny debate about staff terms and conditions, the Staff Regulations are a crucial document as they contain ethics rules governing staff conduct during and after they leave office. Evidence from the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU) and Corporate Europe Observatory show that some of these rules are not well-known, well-followed or well-implemented.
This is particularly true for the rules governing the revolving door, when officials leave public office and join the Brussels lobby industry, or when lobbyists become public officials. The revolving door is at the heart of the close relationship between the EU institutions and big business, and the rules that are currently in place contain weaknesses, loopholes and to often appear to be ignored entirely.
For example, temporary officials (sometimes working for several years) at an EU institution are not automatically covered by the rules (see the case of Marten Westrup); there is no ban on officials moving directly into lobby jobs (see the cases of Mogens Peter Carl, Bruno Dethomas, Jean-Philippe Monod de Froideville); and there is culture of sanctioning breaches in the rules (see the cases of John Bruton and Derek Taylor). Additionally, EU staff can take a sabbatical and there is no outright ban on them becoming lobbyists or senior industry leaders during that period (see the case of Magnus Ovilius).
Now all eyes are on the Parliament, specifically the Legal Affairs or JURI committee, as it considers the Commission's proposal to reform the Staff Regulations. This could provide a once-in-10-years opportunity to tighten the revolving door rules.
And during these times of high unemployment across Europe, of austerity, of radical wage cuts in many sectors and countries, of falling support for the idea of the EU and the EU institutions, it can surely be no bad thing to overhaul the rules around ethical conduct of public office to ensure the highest standards, decision-making in the public (not private) interest, and the elimination of the risk of conflicts of interest.
Hopefully EU officials themselves will agree on the need for the highest levels of ethical conduct. As welcome support, the biggest Commission staff union published a statement in their December 2011 magazine to say that “L’USF exige une réglementation du passage des hauts fonctionnaires, commissaires et parlementaires du service public européen au secteur privé afin d’éviter les conflits d’intérêts contraires aux intérêts des citoyens européens” (“The USF demands that senior officials, commissioners and MEPs who move from serving the European public interest to the private sector are subject to rules, so as to avoid conflicts of interest contrary to the interests of European citizens”).
ALTER-EU and CEO agree. The Parliament has a unique opportunity to consider this issue and to tackle apparent Commission complaisance about staff ethics. We hope it will accept this challenge.
This blog has also been published by the Social Europe Journal.
Monday, 23 January 2012
Ex-Commissioners going through the revolving door: transparency promise delayed
In April 2011 following a public outcry about ex-Commissioners going through the revolving door into industry (lobby) jobs, the European Commission introduced a slightly stricter Code of Conduct for Commissioners. No fewer than 6 out of the 13 Commissioners who left in February 2010 went into such jobs, including powerful Commissioners like Gunter Verheugen and Charlie McCreevy, who took a whole string of lobbying jobs provoking conflicts of interest. The Commission blocked just one job move because of glaring conflicts of interests (McCreevy’s move to NBNK Investments); the rest were given the green light with only very limited restrictions imposed on their activities with their new employers. Announcing the new code, Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič also promised that the Commission would create a website where the public could access information about decisions about Commissioners moving into new jobs. This promise of online transparency was an important change. Previously cumbersome freedom-of-information requests, usually initiated by NGOs, was the only way of shedding any light on Commissioners’ job moves.
Unfortunately it is now clear that the Commission is not in any hurry to implement the promise, quite the contrary. The Commission has informed Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) that the promised website will only be launched when the current Commissioners depart in 2015. This means that the Commission's decisions regarding the Commissioners who left in 2010 will not be published anywhere on the Commission’s website, brushing the related revolving door scandals under the carpet. It is hard to justify why the Commission should not implement its promise now, starting with the most recent cases and then updating the website with new decisions as they happen. This disappointing approach raises questions about the Commission’s commitment to pro-active transparency.
While we’re waiting for the Commission to implement its transparency promise, the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU) website is the place to go for these types of documents. ALTER-EU published a large number of Commission documents regarding the approval procedure for the above-mentioned six ex-Commissioners online back in spring 2011. ALTER-EU has now updated the site with documents about several new cases, received through freedom-of-information requests (using the excellent asktheeu.org website).
Among the new cases are ex-Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner's move to join the board of Alpine Group, a large multinational construction company. The Commission approved this move in the same superficial way as the numerous other board positions she has accepted, without any cooling-off period or ban on lobbying.
Also new on the website is the Commission’s approval of ex-Commissioner Meglena Kuneva's appointment at the Trilateral Commission, a neoliberal thinktank.
Meanwhile, the Commission continues to reject calls for pro-active transparency around its decisions about Commission officials (staff) going through the revolving door. In a letter last month, the Commission argued that introducing a revolving door register for Commission officials would violate data protection and privacy rules because names “are also considered personal data”.
In its response to Commissioner Šefčovič, ALTER-EU has countered this argument and reiterated calls for a revolving door register, pointing to the fact that such a register already exists in the UK. CEO's RevolvingDoorWatch pages will also include information about new cases as we find them.
Thursday, 8 December 2011
That revolving door just keeps on spinning ... yet the Commission seems unwilling to do anything about it
A couple of weeks ago, the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU) launched a new campaign to block the revolving door. Alongside numerous cases of officials, often at the very highest levels in the EU institutions, who have gone through the revolving door to join Brussels' lucrative lobby industry, there was a comprehensive analysis about why the current rules (contained in the Staff Regulations) don't work. In short, they are often ignored, contain loopholes, and aren't properly enforced anyway. And ALTER-EU politely pointed out to Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič that, as the Staff Regulations were already being reviewed, wouldn't it be a good idea to look at the revolving door rules at the same time?
Unfortunately, the response from the Commission has been disappointing, to say the least.
The Commissioner's spokesperson has said that there are already very “strict rules” already in place, although that is hard to believe when the ALTER-EU report pointed out a number of officials who have ignored the rules (and gotten away with it, without sanction), or were not covered by the rules (because of the loophole which excludes staff on temporary contracts from systematic consideration under the rules). Together with the fact that there is only one known case of an official actually being prevented from taking a job under these so-called “strict rules”, the Commission's record in this area seems pretty poor.
Instead, it seems perfectly acceptable for the EU's top officials (and by top we mean Directors-General, advisers to Commissioners and Heads of Cabinet) to go through the revolving door to work for Brussels lobby firms where their corporate clients have a huge interest in hearing the insights of, and benefiting from the personal networks of, such senior officials.
As for Commissioner Šefčovič himself, he might need to do a bit more homework on the revolving door issue. He told an event last week, that EU Commissioners have the longest cooling off period in the world when it comes to the revolving door. But in fact, there is no cooling off period at all for Commissioners; they have a notification period of 18 months during which they must notify the Commission of their new proposed jobs and gain authorisation. This is not the same thing!
But the Commissioner did say one encouraging thing: “We should work hard to avoid conflicts of interest and privileged information. We cannot track what thousands of pensioners are doing but if there are individual cases we will look at them”.
In this case, perhaps the Commissioner could start with looking at the revolving door cases which CEO has listed on its new RevolvingDoorWatch tool. Amongst other cases, RevolvingDoorWatch features Pablo Asbo from Spain, a DG Competition case handler for six years, who is now Associate Director for Competition at Avisa Partners, a Brussels lobby consultancy. At least one of Avisa's current clients was party to a case that Asbo dealt with whilst at DG Competition. Eline Post from the Netherlands was also a case handler at DG Competition and she is now a senior consultant for competition, also at Avisa Partners. Neither Post nor Asbo had authorisation for these moves until CEO raised these cases with the Commission, which constitutes a clear breach of the rules. CEO has submitted complaints about both of these cases.
RevolvingDoorWatch will continue to be updated in the coming weeks as we find new cases, or update current cases. Unfortunately the revolving door problem is not going away for Commissioner Šefčovič...
Monday, 5 December 2011
Swedish MEP lobbying row underlines need for rules on parliament-industry forums
Swedish environment minister Lena Ek last week came under fire for her role in the European Energy Forum (EEF), a cross-party group of MEPs which is funded by large corporations such as Shell, Nord Stream and Vattenfall. Ek, who acted as vice-chairman of the EEF during her time as an MEP, had failed to formally withdraw from her EEF role when she became environment minister. In an article headlined “Environment minister in controversial lobby group” Svenska Dagbladet, one of the largest newspapers in Sweden on 25 November argued that the corporate members of the EEF buy access to MEPs. The EEF's corporate members pay a fee of least 7,000 euro per year for participating in the EEF's dinner debates. The newspaper quoted Social Democratic MEP Marita Ulvskog who declined the invitation from the EEF on ethical grounds, to underline her “independence from such interests”. Green MEP Carl Schlyter commented that the EEF “is very clearly an industry-funded activity. The goal is not to have an open debate about Europe's future energy supply. They want to influence”.
In an article the following day environment spokesperson of the Social Democrats in the Swedish parliament, Matilda Ernkrans, stepped up the pressure on Ek: “I think it is very serious if Sweden now has an environment minister with very close ties to the nuclear and oil lobby”. Ernkrans suggested that the prime minister should intervene on the matter. The controversy also resulted in Svenska Dagbladet publishing a background analysis article looking into the growing lobbying pressure from industry towards MEPs, not the least from the energy and chemical industries hoping to weaken environmental regulation.
Five days after the story first broke, Lena Ek broke the silence in an interview in Svenska Dagbladet. “I understand the discussion, there are obviously problems”, EK said, but went on to argue that the EEF has a balanced programme that is approved by its MEP members and even claimed that “the politicians set the agenda”. A look at the EEF's website gives the impression that its programme is heavily industry-led, including dinner debates on 'the Finnish way' in expanding nuclear power (with the CEO of a Finnish nuclear company as speaker) and on greater gas consumption as part of climate policy (with a speaker from gas giant GDF Suez), although the programme also features corporate speakers on solar and wind energy. The EEF has also this year organised MEPs visits to the oil sands of Alberta, Canada and to a nuclear power plant in France (“at the invitation of AREVA and EDF”). The next dinner debate, in the coming week in Strasbourg, features a Eurelectric lobbyist on “Improving the Energy Efficiency Directive“. Eurelectric is lobbying heavily for weakening the directive.
Responding to what her approach was to handle the heavy lobbying which MEPs are faced with, Ek relied: “by being open about who you meet with and trying to organise it in a transparent organisation that follow the rules of the parliament”. If this refers to the EEF, then Ek's remarks are unjustified. The EEF is not a recognised Intergroup and therefore does not actually fall under any European Parliament rules. This is a serious loophole in the European Parliament's transparency and ethics rules. As shown in a May 2011 report by Corporate Europe Observatory, the EEF is one of least 15 unregulated cross-party groups that are “acting as 'submarines of industry', bringing together MEPs and industry under the radar of Parliamentary rules to achieve policy and legislative changes that benefit industry”. Unfortunately cross-party groups were not included in the Parliament's new code of conduct for MEPs that was approved last week. The debate in Sweden shows that strong rules are needed. Such rules should include a mandatory transparency register as well as ethics obligations.
The EEF has in the meantime updated its website so there is no reference to Lena Ek anymore.
