Articles

The European Parliament has this week adopted the new Staff Regulations. CEO welcomes the steps in the right direction, to help curb conflicts of interest that arise through revolving door between public officials and corporate lobbyists. These include a cooling-off period on certain lobby jobs for senior officials, as well as transparency around these cases. But ending the privileged access and undue influence that the revolving door gives to big business and their lobby groups will require more.

Ahead of the backloading vote at the European Parliament that will take place July 2nd , a coalition of 44 civil society organisations released a statement rejecting the EU ETS, which they say is entrenching fossil fuel use in the EU. They call for MEP attention to be re-directed urgently toward genuine measures to tackle climate change, including a phase-out of fossil-fuels.

Merkel and Hollande have given key positioning to the European Roundtable of Industrialists and their corporate wish-list. They are set to influence a future Competitiveness Pact – a next step towards authoritarian neoliberalism.

After months and months of delay on the review of the rules that govern EU insitution staff – the Staff Regulations – the Commission, Parliament and Council are now finalising the process known as trialogues, where they hash out agreement on the contentious issues and the finer details. It is in these final stages that, amongst the difficult issues of staff pay cuts and working hours, the importance of ensuring robust and far-reaching rules to govern conflicts of interest that arise through the revolving-door must be remembered.

As the European Parliament this week plans to vote on the Commission's proposed amendments to its agrofuels policy, we look at the range of lobby strategies the industry is employing against the amendments, from front groups and trips abroad for MEPs to scientific disinformation.

The register secretariat has now informed CEO that the changes introduced by EPA "meet the requirements" and that they have therefore decided to close the case. But while the EPA's updated register entry now discloses its corporate backers, it remains silent about its links with lobby consultancy firms Competere and DCI Group.

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.

A far-reaching trade deal between the US and EU is to be negotiated, yet the European Commission has drawn a smokescreen over who is setting the agenda for its negotiating position. Amid concerns about the deal's social and environmental impacts, as well as what it will mean for democratic policy-making, Corporate Europe Observatory tried to find out what will be on the treaty table.

For the second year running, citizens from around Europe swarmed the German city of Frankfurt, headquarters of the European Central Bank (ECB). Their aim: to ' Blockupy' the ECB on its 15 th anniversary. A great success in itself, it's also part of a growing movement across Europe against the austerity measures being undemocratically introduced by the ECB, European Commission and the IMF, collectively known as the Troika.