The EU Ombudsman Emily O'Reilly has strongly criticised the EU’s response to the Qatargate corruption scandal in the European Parliament, and castigated its broader approach to ethics, in particular the revolving door policy, whereby EU officials and MEPs go on to work for industries they once regulated.
She drew a comparison with the opioid crisis in the United States, in which American officials charged with holding the pharmaceutical industry to account went on to work for opioid manufacturers.
In a speech to the European Policy Centre (EPC) in Brussels, Ms O’Reilly said the revolving door issue may have contributed to Vladmir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, and that it could be found to have worked against the struggle to reverse global warming.
"Europe's fatal addiction over the last decades arguably has not been to prescription opioids but to Russian gas," she said, "an addiction that has proved no less deadly for thousands of Ukrainians, has very likely emboldened Putin's regime to make the gamble it did in February of last year.
"This dependency was steadily and deliberately nurtured through a strategy of co-opting members of the political elite across the EU, often via the revolving door, into well-paying positions at Russian state-owned companies, including most notoriously the ex German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, who sits on the board of Gazprom."
She added: "I have no doubt that in decades to come, we will also be able to trace a line from failures to tackle the climate crisis to similar phenomena. How many lobbyists, how many former EU institutional insiders will be found to have worked to prevent delay or dilute necessary climate action? How many lives and livelihoods will be lost as a result?"
The Qatargate scandal blew up last December when a number of sitting and former MEPs, including the Greek member Eva Kaili and Antonio Panzeri, were arrested and charged with accepting hundreds of thousands of euro in bribes in order to advance the interests of Qatar and Mauritania in the European Parliament.
In response, the European Commission brought forward legislation to create an ethics body which would govern EU institutions, while the president of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola introduced a 14-point plan to tighten rules around lobbying and transparency.
Yesterday, the parliament's constitutional affairs committee voted on a report on the new rules, with sharp divisions on a number of amendments.
Centre-right and right-wing deputies, as well as some from the centre, have resisted tougher demands on MEPs to reveal their assets and to declare any side employment.
A report this week by Transparency International held that 12% of side activities listed by MEPs related to organisations that were on the EU’s Transparency Register "meaning that almost one in eight side jobs are with organisations that have an active interest in influencing EU policy."
The constitutional affairs committee’s report will be voted on by all MEPs during next week’s plenary session in Strasbourg.
Ms O'Reilly gave a cautious welcome to the Parliament’s efforts on stamping out corruption and illicit lobbying.
"On the substance there are some improvements to the rules, although implementation and monitoring will be critical," she said.
"Rules around lobby meetings, declarations of interest, the acceptance of gifts, assets and side income will be strengthened.
"But MEPs can continue to have those side jobs if they choose, [that’s] a matter of concern in some cases if the line between public representative and private interests influencer becomes blurred."
The EU Ombudsman criticised the European Commission’s proposed ethics body, first announced by President Ursula von der Leyen in 2019, as not going far enough.
She said that the indications were that the body would be "explicitly informal, and with no investigative or sanctioning powers."
Ms O’Reilly added: "Its so far proposed limited mandate again shows the lack of any shared political appetite for the kinds of robust ethics regime that many citizens would have imagined was implicitly and explicitly proposed by Commission President von der Leyen some years ago."
However, she reserved stronger criticism for the EU’s rules on revolving doors.
"My office's multiple investigations repeatedly find a tendency to minimize the impact of the revolving door phenomenon on the integrity of our democratic decision making processes.
"This attitude ignores the clear evidence of the corrosive impact of this form of soft corruption on our democracies and on regulatory outcomes."
She cited a 2021 OECD survey which found that half of respondents in western democracies believed an elected or appointed official "would accept a well paid job in the private sector in exchange for political favour."
She told the audience: "If nearly half the electorate, rightly or wrongly, believe that politicians are treating meetings with industry chiefs that they are ostensibly regulating as a kind of job interview, this partly explains the widespread cynicism and dissatisfaction with our democratic systems."
Under EU rules, if staff members intend to take up employment within two years of leaving, or while on unpaid leave, they must seek authorisation and if there is a risk of a conflict of interest the European Commission may either prohibit intended jobs or decide to place conditions or restrictions on the former staff members’ activities in the new job.
Senior officials can also be prohibited for one year from lobbying their former EU institution in areas for which they were responsible during their last three years working in that institution.
