Brussels Sunshine

Media reactions to Commission President Barroso’s decisions on the division of portfolios over the 26 candidate Commissioners have concentrated on who got key portfolios, like Michel Barnier getting the internal market job, which includes the politically hot financial services dossier. What seems to have gone unnoticed so far, is the lack of clarity over who will take over political responsibility for the next phase of the European Transparency Initiative.

In the last few weeks, CEO has tried in vain to access the European Parliament's Register of Intergroups. After numerous phone-calls and fruitless email correspondence, we raised the white flag and wrote a complaint letter to the Parliament's Quaestors instead. Our failed search for the register reveals an unacceptable lack of transparency.

Channel 4's documentary Dispatches yesterday revealed a document showing that former EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson (2004-2008) personally signed the decision to lift import tariffs for Rusal, the aluminum giant owned by Lord Mandelson's close friend Oleg Deripaska.

Commission President Barroso surprised many with his early announcement on Friday afternoon of the portfolios for the 13 new candidate Commissioners and the 13 current Commissioners who will continue in Barroso-2.

According to eFinancialCareers "it emerged yesterday that the Alternative Investment Management Association is paying Finsbury €1m to lobby against the EU’s Alternative Investment Fund Managers’ Directive."

A new High Level Working Party of MEPs and Commission representatives starts talks tomorrow on a joint Commission-Parliament lobby disclosure register. Yesterday, more than 25 MEPs were represented (in person or by an assistant) at a seminar in the European Parliament on how to achieve real improvements in transparency around EU lobbying. The seminar is a follow-up to the pledge signed by more than 75 MEPs in the run-up to the European Parliament elections, committing to “to provide leadership in lobbying transparency and ethics”.

ALTER-EU's new report, 'A captive Commission – the role of the financial industry in shaping EU regulation' which was launched last week, shows that most of the so-called 'expert groups' advising the EU Commission on financial market regulation are dominated by industry lobbyists. More than 80% of the non-governmental 'experts' in these advisory groups represent big banks and investment funds.

The number of entries in the Commission’s voluntary lobby transparency register has now passed 2,000 (753 of which are Brussels-based). The Commission celebrated this as a big success, but in fact the rate of participation is still below 1/3 of Brussels-based lobbies (estimated as 2,600 in an European Parliament report from 2000). Among the recent sign-ups are some big fish, but their reports beg a few questions.

The Belgian daily newspaper De Standaard has this week published an interesting series of articles on EU lobbying. While one article covers the critical perspective of lobby watchdog groups like Corporate Europe Observatory, De Standaard also published a lengthy interview with Russell Patten, who leads the Brussels office of lobby consultancy giant Grayling Global.

After the Commission’s refusal last week to disclose the declaration of Pat Cox’s “professional activities”, Corporate Europe Observatory has now also received a more general reply from the Commission about the issue of Mr. Cox’s conflicts of interest. Remarkably, the Commission argues that the conflicts of interest rules of its Health and Consumers department (DG SANCO) do not apply in the case of Mr. Cox.

The European Commission has rejected Corporate Europe Observatory’s request to see the “Declaration of activities of Pat Cox in view of applying to the function of Special Adviser to the Commission”, stating in its letter (21st September) that it was prevented from doing so because of “personal data protection”.