revolving door

Is it appropriate to let a former board member of a Deutsche Bank investment fund go straight from there to a key position in the new European supervisory structure for banks? What's the problem with hiring people with strong links to financial corporations to monitor the big banks? Or to be part of decisions on whether measures to ensure financial stability should be imposed on them or not? And can they keep working in the financial sector at the same time?
If you ask the European Central Bank, there is absolutely no problem with this scenario.

The new European Parliament is only weeks old and already three ex-MEPs from perhaps its most important committee have taken a spin in the revolving door to join the private sector. It's clear that the code of conduct for MEPs needs urgent reform.

In the run-up to the European elections in late May, many members of the European Parliament (MEPs) will be considering their future careers. If experiences from the end of the previous parliamentary term in 2009 are any indication, many will be approached by lobby firms and industry groups hoping to entice them through the revolving door: the route from the European Parliament to Brussels' for-profit lobby circles is a well-trodden path.

Two new revolving door cases published today by Corporate Europe Observatory illustrate how the revolving door continues to spin between the EU institutions and the corporate sector, and how the EU needs a far tougher approach to tackling potential conflicts of interest.

CEO responds to the Commission's positive picture of its handling of revolving doors cases and conflicts of interest. Can the Commission afford to be quite so complacent?

Key Swedish Match lobbyist in the Dalligate tobacco lobby scandal worked in the European Commission for five years. But unbelievably, when he left to become a tobacco lobbyist he was not screened for potential conflicts of interest, a clear breach of the revolving door rules in the Staff Regulations. Once again, the shoddy implementation of ethics rules by the Commission has been exposed in the wake of a big lobbying scandal. Read the whole case on CEO's RevolvingDoorWatch.

On Sunday 28 April 2013, OLAF’s investigation report on the Dalli case was published on the website of the newspaper Malta Today. After a first reading of the report (of which two pages appear to be missing), read Corporate Europe Observatory's first observations.

The longer term effects of the revolving door between public officials and private sector lobbyists have been graphically illustrated in the wake of the Dalligate lobby scandal, in the case of Michel Petite. Five years on, Petite represents the legal interests of corporate clients to the Commission. Aside from the nutty Commission decision to reappoint him as an ethical adviser on the revolving door, the Petite case illustrates that the upper echelons of political power at the European Commission still don't take the problem of the revolving-door seriously.