Articles

Twenty months after the launch of the Commission's voluntary lobbying register, less than 40 percent of Brussels-based lobby consultancies have signed up, according to a new survey from the transparency alliance ALTER-EU.

The Portuguese weekly Expresso reports that the Portuguese government is about to hire lobby consultancy firm Kreab & Gavin Anderson (KGA) to lobby on its behalf. Expresso writes that KGA will advice the government on the PR strategy for its Stability and Growth Pact, a new austerity program of welfare cuts and privatisations aimed to bring the country's deficits within EU limits.

Corporate Europe Observatory has filed a complaint to the European Ombudsman asking him to investigate how the former chair of the Parliament, Pat Cox’s conflicts of interests were assessed by the European Commission before his appointment and then re-appointment (2007 - 2009) as a Special Adviser to the out-going Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva.

The new European Commission (Barroso-II) took office on 10 February. Just seven dayslater insurance giant Munich Re announced that they had headhunted the out-going EU Commissioner for external relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner (2004-2010).

Aquiris is the name of a consortium that was created in 2001 by Veolia Environnement, the biggest water services corporation in the world, and other companies to bid for the building and operation of the North Brussels wastewater treatment plant (WWTP), a €1.2 billion contract. Prior to that, most of Brussels' wastewater was not treated but dumped raw in rivers, an option which is no longer acceptable under a 1991 EU Directive (91/271/EEC) concerning urban wastewater treatment which requires all European cities to treat their wastewater before disposal.

Corporate Europe Observatory and Greenpeace European Unit, along with nineteen other organisations have written to the members of the STOA-panel of the European Parliament, to raise concerns about an upcoming seminar they are holding on the EU GMO policy. This seminar is organised in cooperation with the Public Research Regulation Initiative (PRRI), an industry-biased pro-GMO lobbygroup, despite its name and pretentions.

During the recent World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial in Geneva (30 November to 2 December 2009), protesters put the spotlight on some of the big businesses in town. With little going on inside the ministerial, they organised daily guided tours to banks, agricultural and energy traders to show that there's more to Geneva than international organisations, humanitarianism and luxury watches – and more to trade negotiations than conflicts between the US and India. Because it is companies that benefit and quite often also co-write global trade rules.

While some corporate climate lobby groups have in public lamented the failure of the UN climate talks in Copenhagen to reach a strong agreement, behind closed doors, many of them are relieved. Indeed, if there was any attempt to agree meaningful action on climate change in Copenhagen, a number of big business players had been working hard to prevent it. This article looks at the corporate lobbyists who were nominated for the Angry Mermaid Award ahead of Copenhagen – and asks what they achieved.