International

Thanks to lobbying watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) there is now a website where you can see what, for example, former European Commission president Jose Barroso, or his right-hand woman Vivianne Reding is currently up to. And guess what: the revolving door is in full swing. Thanks to their networking in the world of business, Brussels Europhiles needn’t fear that they’ll be out of work for too long. Potential conflicts of interest are subject to the mildest of controls. It is for this reason that the transparency network in the European Parliament will be going in hard against this revolving door between the world of politics and that of corporate business.

Barroso claims that all the work he does for the World Economic Forum (WEF), the annual meeting of the great and the good from the world of business and politics, held at Davos, Switzerland, and the ‘European Business Summit’ is unpaid. It nevertheless illustrates how interwoven is the work of this ex-president of the European Commission with big capital. His right-hand woman Vivianne Reding has gone even further. She has become a MEP, but believes she has sufficient time left for her membership of the board of directors of the corporations Nyrstar and Agfa-Gevaert. The conflict of interest here lies of course right on the surface.

The list of such examples is long, much too long. People should be able to trust politicians to serve the general interest. In Brussels, for many politicians, this is evidently not the case. They would rather line their own nests by networking within the web of corporate capital. This is particularly galling when you know that severance payments for European Commissioners can be as high as €9000 per month.

Now that I have become co-chair of a newly established network for transparency it’s possible that we can use this group to call the EU institutions to account. The codes of conduct clearly don’t work with sufficient vigour. That must change. We want text and explanation regarding the trade-offs that have been made, because it’s hardly to be imagined for example, that Reding , fifteen years a Commissioner, will not be using her insider’s knowledge in her new functions. We will be getting to the bottom of this and will continue to report our findings, until at last only politicians who want to serve the citizens of the EU member states, instead of buttering their own bread, are found at the European Commission or the European Parliament.