Conflicts of interest

NGOs including Corporate Europe Observatory have today raised serious concerns about the risk of conflicts of interest by an MEP working on the Corporate Sustainability and Due Diligence file.

The new EU Energy Platform Industry Advisory Group, created at the request of oil and gas majors like Shell, BP, Total and Eni, represents a conflict of interest on a colossal scale. These alliances must be stopped if we are to have any chance of breaking Europe’s fossil gas habit, addressing fuel poverty, and averting climate crisis.

After seeing his first pick for Commissioner rejected by the European Parliament due to concerns of conflict of interests, French President Macron seems to have doubled down with a potentially even more controversial nomination: Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos.

Some of the candidates put forward to become the new European Commissioners are of concern due to potential conflicts of interest – from share ownership in fossil fuels and finance to overly close relationships with business – and corruption probes, while MEPs complain of a lack of a robust transparency process to properly scrutinise the interests of the Commissioners-designate.

Despite strong calls from MEPs and the public, ExxonMobil and its lobby groups mobilise enough behind-the-scenes pressure to stop the European Parliament taking away its lobby badges

The political climate in the Czech Republic has grown increasingly repressive following the election of oligarch Andrej Babiš as prime minister in October 2017. With the Czech civil society space squeezed tighter and tighter by Babiš's government, we want to help draw attention to the duress and threats under which many progressive organisations and media outlets now have to work. In the following interview, our Czech board member Jakub Patočka explains what is at stake in the country as targeted defamation campaigns and funding withdrawals risk to make the work of critical NGOs and newspapers

We pay our taxes, so why don’t corporations? The Big Four are embedded in EU policy-making on tax avoidance and this report concludes that it is time to kick this industry out of EU anti-tax avoidance policy.

Thanks to bottom-up pressure the European Union stepped back from supporting Trump and his big polluters’ agenda, but fell short of backing calls for a conflict of interest policy at the UN climate talks.

Tackling conflicts of interest at the UN climate talks is up for negotiation: should fossil fuel interests be allowed to participate at these conferences, or even in climate policy-making in general?

Wouldn't it be time that the EU stops allowing a direct representation of the food industry's interests on the Board of the EU Food Safety Authority (EFSA)?

The push for reform continues from within the European Parliament, from the Ombudsman’s office and from civil society. This year, two Ombudsman inquiries, a Parliament discussion on the use of transitional allowances to prevent conflicts of interest, and finally, Parliament’s reaction to the Commission proposal for reforming Commissioners’ ethics rules all need to be wrapped up. Here’s a roundup of the various factors that might push a reform of the revolving-door rules in 2018.

The decision of the European Ombudsman to ask the European Central Bank President to end his membership of an opaque and exclusive club dominated by financial corporations is a step towards ending a culture of secretive collusion between regulators and big banks.