Commission
bumps into its own revolving door
Neelie
Kroes’ failure to disclose Bahamas business role highlights blurry
EU ethics rules.
By
David M. Herszenhorn
and
Quentin Ariès
9/23/16, 5:29 AM CET
As a European
Commission vice president overseeing the Continent’s digital
agenda, Neelie Kroes used her powerful post to become a prominent and
outspoken advocate of Uber, the ride-sharing service.
In May, 18 months
after Kroes’ term ended, Uber hired her as a senior adviser on
regulatory issues — a job that could eventually reward her with a
small fortune.
No one has alleged
anything illegal about the arrangement. But Kroes’ overlapping
interests on Uber, as public servant and private businesswoman,
highlight the blurred lines between the political and corporate
sectors that are increasingly testing the bounds of EU ethics rules.
Last Friday, Kroes,
who also served as commissioner for competition from 2004 to 2009,
admitted a clear violation of the rules: failing to disclose her role
as director of an offshore shell corporation that had been registered
in the Bahamas.
Her admission came
as the Commission was already facing a storm of public outrage over
its former president, José Manuel Barroso, who in July accepted a
senior executive position with Goldman Sachs. The two revelations
have left the current president, Jean-Claude Juncker, and his
administration scrambling to show critics that they are capable of
policing the business dealings of current and former officials.
“We don’t
have a secret police service that can be sent out to the Bahamas or
elsewhere to track down information we haven’t been given” —
Margaritis Schinas, chief European Commission spokesman
On Thursday, faced
with a barrage of questions about Kroes, the Commission’s chief
spokesman, Margaritis Schinas, said: “We have very strict rules in
place.” But he also conceded the EU has limited ability to check up
on the numerous officials spinning through the Berlaymont’s
revolving doors.
“We assume, we
rely on the completeness of declarations made by our commissioners;
they are published,” Schinas said. “We don’t have a secret
police service that can be sent out to the Bahamas or elsewhere to
track down information we haven’t been given. But when it comes to
the commitments declared, well these are published on the internet,
so there is transparency, and it is possible for us to check that,
but obviously that depends on what’s communicated to us.”
Caught off guard
It was a different
kind of internet transparency that led to the revelation that Kroes,
during her time as a member of the EU executive body, had been a
director of Mint Holdings Limited, an offshore company created as
part of a plan to purchase assets from Enron, the American energy
conglomerate that collapsed after a huge accounting fraud.
The information
about Kroes was included in leaked documents published Wednesday by
the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
To get ahead of that
news, Kroes sent an email to Juncker late last week admitting the
lapse and blaming it on a clerical error. Officials said that the
email was not noticed until Wednesday, after reporters had made
repeated inquiries about her position with Mint Holdings.
Neither Kroes, nor
her lawyer, Oscar Hammerstein, responded to email and phone messages
seeking comment on Thursday.
Under pressure to
respond to the criticism, Schinas said Juncker had sent a letter to
Kroes seeking further details about the violation. Officials said
they would decide whether to pursue disciplinary action based on her
response — a process that can only be carried out in court.
One potential
sanction in such cases is to revoke a former commissioner’s EU
pension. But officials said Thursday that Kroes, 75, is not receiving
a pension — revealing a potential gap in the Commission’s
accountability system.
Kroes, if
sanctioned, might also be forced to pay back to the Commission her
18-month transition allowance, worth up to €13,000 a month, and the
€23,000 “resettlement allowance” every commissioner receives
upon leaving office. It was not immediately clear how much transition
allowance Kroes had received.
Officials said that
only after receiving a formal response from Kroes would they decide
if additional steps were needed, such as scrutinizing her current
business dealings. In addition to Uber, Kroes holds paid advisory
positions with Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Salesforce, a San
Francisco-based cloud computing company.
Her role with Bank
of America began in February 2015, with approval of the Commission’s
ethics committee, just three months after she left her position as a
Commission vice president.
One senior EU
official said the Commission was blindsided by the revelation about
Kroes, even as it was still reeling from outrage over Barroso’s job
with Goldman Sachs. More than 145,000 people have signed a petition —
set up by a group of Commission employees — calling for Barroso’s
pension to be revoked.
“We still do not
really know what happened and I think the Kroes issue is not the same
one as Barroso,” a senior EU official said, speaking on condition
of anonymity. “But for sure on Barroso, the Commission did not
respond as quickly as it should have. The Commission has to be aware
of protecting itself and its reputation. So they should not miss the
window to take care of Kroes.”
The senior official
said Juncker had miscalculated in thinking he could successfully
separate himself from the previous administration and its scandals.
“They were not really prepared,” the official said.
Numerous officials
said the Kroes and Barroso scandals highlighted a far broader
challenge in which there is a constant flow of high-profile figures
between government and private industry, creating all sorts of
entangled relationships.
“They meddled
so much with business interests that now they live outside of any
realities. They don’t really care if it backfires against the
institution where they used to work” — senior EU official
“It seems they do
not care about the institutions and political accountability after
they left office,” the EU official said. “They meddled so much
with business interests that now they live outside of any realities.
They don’t really care if it backfires against the institution
where they used to work.”
Barroso has insisted
that he did nothing wrong, but his case nonetheless is being
investigated by the Commission’s ethics committee after Juncker
said he should now be considered a lobbyist. That comment set off a
war-of-words between the two men last week.
Responsibility for
enforcing the ethics rules falls to the Commission, but also the
European Court of Justice and the European Anti-Fraud Office, known
as OLAF.
OLAF had no comment
Thursday on the Kroes matter.
Kroes’ promise
Before taking office
as the commissioner in charge of competition, Kroes had promised
never to return to the business world.
“After my period
in the Commission, I will not take any responsibility in the business
world, even not for example a bed and breakfast activity,” Kroes
said in 2004 at her confirmation hearing in the European Parliament.
But this June, when the Dutch public broadcaster VRT reminded Kroes
about her statement more than a decade ago she walked out of the
interview.
Kroes, who is known
in the Brussels bubble as “Steelie Neelie” — a sort of Dutch
reincarnation of the British Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher — was
pushed to make the pledge because lawmakers clearly saw a risk of
numerous conflicts of interest. In her disclosure forms, she listed
more than 60 former roles in companies and other organizations.
Notably, Mint Holdings was not on the list.
That pledge,
however, has now appeared to backfire — giving further ammunition
to her critics.
Neelie Kroes at a
TechCrunch Disrupt Europe/London event
Kroes at a
TechCrunch Disrupt Europe/London event | Anthony Harvey/Getty Images
for TechCrunch
“Neelie Kroes is
an outstanding negative example for corrupting trust in politics,”
Green MEP Sven Giegold said in a statement. “Withholding
information about her business activities in the Bahamas was an
outright breach of her official duties. These revelations are the
inglorious crown of a career full of conflicts of interests.”
In an interview with
the Guardian, Kroes’ lawyer said she did not feel bound by the
pledge after having been appointed to a separate term as a Commission
vice president.
Even before this
week’s disclosure about her ethical lapse, Kroes had stirred
controversy with an opinion article in the Guardian slamming the
decision levied against Apple by the current European commissioner
for competition, Margrethe Vestager.
Vestager ruled that
Ireland gave illegal tax benefits worth up to €13 billion to Apple
and must now recoup that money plus interest.
Schinas himself
issued a rare personal response to Kroes’ article. “We understand
that it may be sometimes challenging to reconcile the role as a
former commissioner with the temptation to publicly express the views
of those in Silicon Valley or elsewhere who oppose the Commission’s
decisions,” Schinas said.
Once again, Kroes’
overlapping roles seemed to blur the lines.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário