Champagne, chocolates and gold: EU Parliament
chief reveals massive gift haul
Roberta Metsola says she’s being transparent but
missed the deadline for MEPs to declare gifts 125 times.
BY EDDY WAX
JANUARY 19,
2023 4:00 AM CET
European
Parliament President Roberta Metsola declared 142 gifts she received on a
public register for MEPs, in a move that laid bare the limited transparency
rules at the EU institution.
Metsola, a
Maltese MEP from the center-right European People’s Party group, entered the
gifts she received in an official public record that lawmakers rarely update.
In doing so last week, however, she missed the deadline for MEPs to declare
their gifts in relation to 125 of the items on her list.
Metsola’s
team argued her declarations broke with years of secrecy by former presidents
of the Parliament, none of whom ever went as far as publicly revealing the
hundreds of gifts showered on them by foreign dignitaries. Her spokesperson
said the deadline for MEPs did not apply to Metsola by “custom” because she’s
the president of the Parliament as well as an MEP, though her team could not
point to this exemption being set out officially anywhere in writing.
“This shows
the system is broken,” said Michiel van Hulten, director of Transparency
International EU and a former MEP. “You can’t operate an ethics system on the
basis of unwritten rules. It’s good that she’s now done this, but there’s no
prize for sticking to the rules.”
The
emergence of Metsola’s gifts comes at a highly sensitive time for the EU
Parliament. The institution is battling to re-establish its credibility amid a
police investigation into allegations that senior Brussels figures were
involved in corruption, money laundering and participation in a criminal
organization.
“When a
president receives a gift, it is not in my capacity as a member, but as the
Parliament,” Metsola told POLITICO. After the so-called Qatargate corruption
investigation began, “the scenario was different, which means I’m going to list
everything which would anyway have been declared internally,” she said.
Metsola’s
spokesperson added: “She wants to be as open as possible and set an example
that other MEPs can follow.”
Terry
Reintke, co-president of the Greens group, said Metsola’s disclosures showed
the need for an independent EU ethics body based outside the Parliament.
“Transparency should apply to all so it’s good that she’s making it public
now,” Reintke said.
“I think
that it also shows that we just need a much better enforcement of the rules and
that we cannot leave everything up to internal scrutiny structures.”
The gifts
Metsola received included: a gold model tower from senior Moroccan politician
Naam Mayara; a white dress with golden embroidery from Fawzia Zainal, speaker
in the parliament of Bahrain; a scarf from French Prime Minister Élisabeth
Borne; Sennheiser wireless earphones from the German Bundestag; a vase from the
Czech presidency of the EU Council; a white blouse from Moldova’s President
Maia Sandu; a book about Bruges from the rector of the College of Europe,
Federica Mogherini; and a decorative plate from Uzbekistan’s ambassador to Benelux
countries.
Metsola
also received Champagne, chocolates, cookies, cake and dried sausage, which
were “served in the course of the Parliament’s functions.”
For 125 of
those gifts, Metsola’s declarations came after the deadline to notify them in
accordance with the rules for MEPs. Under Parliament’s code of conduct for
members, gifts should be disclosed at the latest by the end of the month
following the month in which MEPs received them.
According
to an annex to the code of conduct for MEPs, the scope of the gift rules covers
“any” MEP representing Parliament in an official capacity, including the
president. It is, nonetheless, the case that the person who must be notified
about gifts is the president herself, or at least her own office.
According
to an official from the Parliament press services, previous presidents tended
to declare their gifts in one go at the end of the term, bypassing the process
of putting them on the public register and instead directly informing the
Parliament’s civil service.
Each
declaration of a president was “done administratively, but was not put on the
public register,” the official said.
According
to public records, only one previous president — the EPP’s Antonio Tajani, who
had the job from 2017 to 2019 — declared a gift on the public register. It was
a book of portraits from a Portuguese politician.
However,
there is no written rule that explicitly states the president is exempt from
following the procedure covering other MEPs, and the European Parliament’s
press service was unable to say where this interpretation of the rules sprung
from or who was responsible for applying it in this way.
A
spokesperson for Metsola said the “custom” was that the president of the
Parliament has more leeway and is only expected to declare gifts when her term
comes to an end. The gifts are not given to Metsola herself, but to the
institution of the European Parliament, the official argued. Metsola is
choosing to be more transparent than she needs to be by making public
declarations while still in office, the spokesperson added, saying she will now
regularly update the register gift by gift.
“It is not
the same as for MEPs because these are gifts for the European Parliament
accepted by the president,” the spokesperson said. “She’s breaking with
previous practice from previous presidents to do this in a more transparent
way, and as they come in, rather than as a big package in the end.”
“She wants
to be as open as possible and set an example that other MEPs can follow,” the
spokesperson added.
Asked where
the written procedure spells out that looser rules apply to the president of
the Parliament, the spokesperson said: “I don’t know exactly where it’s written
but it’s a custom that’s put in place, it’s how previous presidents have done
it. In this way it is, what you say, it’s established practice.”
Metsola
received all the gifts she declared since becoming president on January 18,
2022.
EU
Parliament officials also said that in the past there had been reluctance to be
proactive about declaring presents to avoid breeding a culture of competitive
gift-giving among lobbyists and MEPs.
Corruption
allegations
Metsola is
battling to repair Parliament’s reputation after the Qatargate controversy blew
up last month. The investigation by Belgian prosecutors has seen four suspects
detained, including a former vice president of the Parliament, MEP Eva Kaili,
on preliminary corruption charges pending an investigation into alleged
influence-buying involving Qatar and Morocco.
Former MEP
Pier Antonio Panzeri has now admitted his guilt and struck a deal to cooperate
with the prosecutor in exchange for a more lenient sentence.
Earlier
this month, Metsola announced 14 proposed reforms to the system to beef up the
transparency rules for MEPs in the wake of Qatargate, including changes to make
the gift register more visible on the Parliament’s website. Her plan was set
out at a closed-door meeting with top Parliament politicians.
The only
one of Metsola’s gifts that she has recorded as being worth more than €150 is
one from the United Arab Emirates’ foreign minister, which she received in
February 2022. It is described in the register as an “icon & drawer with
individually wrapped dates.” A plaque on the gift itself describes it as a
“shield representing Expo 2020 logo,” a world fair that the UAE held in Dubai
between October 2021 and March 2022.
The gifts
register applies to all MEPs but since the start of this legislature in
mid-2019, only 10 lawmakers, including Metsola, have declared any gifts at all.
Daniel
Caspary, a German EPP lawmaker who declared seven gifts, five of which he
received while leading a Parliament delegation for relations with Southeast
Asia, wrote to POLITICO: “Due to covid there were hardly any international
activities within the last years. Perhaps that is why there are only a few
colleagues who registered presents.”
As
president, Metsola is ultimately responsible for sanctioning breaches of the
code of conduct, after receiving advice from a panel of MEPs. This raises the
strange prospect of Metsola having to rule on whether to sanction herself for
missing the deadline.
Who has been lobbying the European Commission? A
look at meetings since von der Leyen took over
Author
Lucinda
Pearson
Date
14 July,
2022
https://transparency.eu/who-has-been-lobbying-the-european-commission/
This week’s
Uber Files investigation by the Guardian and the ICIJ revealed how Uber
arranged lobby meetings with national and EU politicians with the help of a
former EU Commissioner who was banned by the Commission’s own rules from doing
so. This revelation comes hot on the heels of the scandal of deleted text
messages between President von der Leyen and the CEO of Pfizer at the height of
the COVID crisis. This has prompted us to take a wider look at lobby meetings –
at least those that have been published. Who has been meeting the Commission on
the radar? Read on to find out.
All data
used in this analysis is available on www.integritywatch.eu under the redesigned
European Commission meetings section.
We should
start off by looking at the bigger picture. Since the start of the current term
in 2019, Commissioners and their high-level staff have held a total of
14,397meeting with lobbyists. With two years still to go, it remains to be seen
if they will match the 27,090 meetings held by the Juncker Commission. The
graph below shows the share of meetings by category of lobby organisations:
Who are the
most popular high-level Commission representatives among lobbyists?
Commissioner Thierry Breton takes the top spot, having hosted 955 meetings. In
second place is Anouk Faber, a Cabinet Member of Commissioner Nicolas Schmit
who has attended 502 meetings, closely followed in third place by Nicolas
Schmit himself who has participated in 462 meetings.
Let’s take
a look at who lobbyists are targeting. Do they aim straight for the
Commissioners or rather try to gain influence through their staffers and
cabinets? The latter seems to be the case. Cabinet Members of the Commissioners
have attended a staggering 10,437 lobby meetings, with Commissioners
participating in 3,474. Directors-General come in last with 1767 meetings.
And now to
the top dogs on the other side of the table – the lobbyists who have managed to
secure the most meetings. As per our previous analysis, BUSINESSEUROPE are
still the interest group who have held the most meetings with the Commission.
Since the start of this mandate, they have had 129 high-level meetings. They
are followed by the European Trade Union Confederation with 110 meetings. An
NGO takes the third spot – WWF European Policy Programme had 85 meetings. The
chart below shows the top 15.
Comparing
this list to the Juncker Commission, the graph below shows that the top 15
organisations stay more or less the same, environmental NGOs had fewer
high-level meetings with staff of the Juncker Commission than the von der Leyen
Commission.
Companies
and groups have the most access to policy-makers, but which ones? Below you can
find the top 10 private organisations who have held the most meetings.
The graph
below details the top 10 companies who met with the Juncker Commission. The
inclusion of a financial institution and an energy company in the top 10 of the
von der Leyen Commission could signal companies focusing on particular
legislative files. We also see an absence of telecom companies in the top 10 of
the current mandate, excluding Vodaphone who remain firmly there.
Finally, it
is interesting to note which portfolios have attracted the most meetings, and
subsequently, which types of organisations have had the most face-time with the
policy-makers responsible for them. Here is the ranking of all portfolios by
popularity:
Taking the
top five portfolios, we can also see which interest groups have had the most
access. In all but one of the categories, companies and groups have held the
most meetings. Under the portfolio An Economy that Works for People, trade and
business associations are the leaders in access, although they also represent
corporate interests.
Von der
Leyen herself has quite an imbalance of meetings when we look at companies vs
NGOs. She has met with companies 84 times, and NGOs only 17 times. TI EU has
often called for policy makers to ensure a level playing field for all interest
representatives by meeting roughly equal numbers of commercial and
non-commercial interests. We encourage the President to redress the imbalance
during the remainder of her mandate
The
redesigned Commission meetings section of Integrity Watch was developed making
use of the newly published lobby meetings in open data format. The availability
of information in open data format has been a long advocacy ask of TI EU and we
congratulate the Commission for adopting it.
Unfortunately,
both the European Parliament and European Council, have not adopted an open
data format and still publish lobby meetings over hundreds of scattered web
pages. A centralised machine-readable database enhances transparency, fosters
integrity and guarantees accountability towards citizens. We therefore call on
both the Parliament and Council to follow suit.
In addition
to the open data issue, only a fraction of EU policy-makers actually publish
meetings, giving just a snapshot of the influence happening in Brussels. We
call on all EU institutions to bring full transparency to Brussels-based
lobbying by expanding lobby transparency requirements to all individuals that
help shape the legislation.
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