European Commission fails to act against conflicts of interest

The Alliance for Lobby Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU) is disappointed with the European Commission's Communication on "Enhancing the Environment for Professional Ethics in the Commission" launched yesterday.

The Communication does not formulate clear policies and measures against conflicts of interests of public office holders or cases of "revolving doors", when former senior Commission staff start to work as lobbyists.

ALTER-EU welcomes measures that would help officials identify situations of actual or potential conflict, as well as the announcement that rules regarding outside activities and provisions dealing with officials who have left the service will be revised. However, the Communication does not specify what kind of rules the Commission is planning to introduce. "The Commission is downplaying ethics rules as internal matters, but the issues at stake are of major public concern", explains Christine Pohl from Friends of the Earth Europe. "ALTER-EU has already proposed clear rules such as binding cooling-off periods to prevent cases of revolving doors. The Commission needs to act and come up with concrete proposals on how to solve these problems", she added.

"The new Communication on ethics is far too weak", says ALTER-EU

The Communication does not address many of the real problems that have been identified by ALTER-EU and others over the past few years. For instance, a recently published book exposes industry lobbyists that work at the Commission as 'Seconded National Experts' or 'temporary administrators', shaping EU legislation and policies from behind their desks as Commission officials. The book quotes Commission Vice-President Siim Kallas, who argues that these practices should be stop­ped, but the Communication does not address the issue at all. "It is unacceptable that lobbyists work inside the Commission", says Ulrich Mueller from LobbyControl. "We ask the Commission to formal­ly announce the termination of this practice and disclose all cases that have happened in recent years", he said.

Regrettably, the Commission has based its Communications on the December 2007 study on regulating conflicts of interest for holders of public office, carried out by the European Institute of Public Administration in December 2007. The main conclusion from this study is that the Commission's ethics rules compare favourably to those of other EU institutions and most Member States. "The study contains serious flaws in both methodology and argumentation, makes unacceptably weak recommendations and essentially lets the Commission off the hook", says Olivier Hoedeman from the Amsterdam-based Corporate Europe Observatory. "The conclusions only underline how under-regulated many types of conflicts of interest still are in most Member States. Using the study's conclusions as an argument for preserving the status quo at the Commission is misguided and could be interpreted as a sign of complacency", he added.

ALTER-EU calls upon the Commission to come up with concrete measures to deal with revolving doors, conflicts of interest and lobbyists working inside the institutions. ALTER-EU believes that the integrity of European institutions is at stake - therefore the debate about these measures needs to be public and not a purely internal process within the Commission.

ALTER-EU, the Alliance for Transparency and Ethics Regulation, is a coalition of over 160 civil society groups, trade unions, academics and public affairs firms calling for: an EU lobbying disclosure legislation; improved ethics rules for European institution officials; a termination of cases of privileged access and undue influence granted to corporate lobbyists.