/public

Civil society call for full transparency in EU-US trade negotiations | Corporate Europe Observatory
▻http://corporateeurope.org/trade/2014/03/civil-society-call-full-transparency-eu-us-trade-negotiations
▻http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/s119571398957059959_p71_i1_w1706.jpeg?itok=9ExNKK-7

Together with 26 networks and organisations, Corporate Europe Observatory has today launched a joint civil society call for transparency in the TTIP negotiations. The call is directed to European Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht and is asking for the full disclosure of all negotiation texts as well as pro-active lobby transparency. It is open for more civil society organisations who want to support it.

Dear Commissioner De Gucht,

The undersigned organisations are writing to express deep concerns about the lack of transparency around the ongoing trade talks on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). We are calling on you to open the negotiation process to the public, by releasing the negotiating mandate, documents submitted by the EU, and negotiating texts.

The European Commission has repeatedly stated that trade and investment between the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) are already highly integrated, and that the main focus of TTIP will be to achieve regulatory convergence by removing so-called non-tariff barriers to trade. This means that the outcome has much less to do with traditional trade issues such as tariffs, than with the regulations and standards that apply in the EU and the US and that affect every single aspect of citizens’ daily lives – from the quality of the food we eat to the safety of chemicals we use, the energy we consume, or the impact of financial services on each of us.

Civil society groups in the EU and in the US have voiced concerns that this might lower standards and remove safeguards across the board. They have requested greater transparency about the negotiations to address these concerns. The setting up of a stakeholder advisory group for the negotiations by the EU – although an improvement compared to previous negotiations – is far from sufficient to make the process fully transparent. Members of the group will have limited access to the negotiating texts under strict confidentiality rules, and these will remain out of reach for the rest of interested civil society groups and citizens.

The European Commission has argued that secrecy in this process is inevitable because this is a matter of international relations. If these negotiations are intended to affect domestic regulations, standards and safeguards on each side, then citizens have the right to know what is being put on the table, and how this is being negotiated. The standard legislative process in the EU allows for public scrutiny of each step of policy-making as well as full involvement of the European Parliament. We would urge that those negotiations should comply with the same level of openness. The process should also allow for public accountability of the European Commission for the negotiating positions that it takes. Given that many of the issues under negotiation relate to the environment, this would also reflect the EU’s obligations under Article 3(7) of the Aarhus Convention to promote access to information, public participation and access to justice in international environmental decision-making processes.1

Furthermore there are several examples of international negotiation processes, which provide a greater degree of openness to civil society than the negotiations on TTIP do, and whereby negotiating documents are disclosed........

#TTIP Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
#transparency
#EU-US trade negotiations

The agrichemical lobby already laying the ground work for the next Parliament | Corporate Europe Observatory
▻http://corporateeurope.org/agribusiness/2014/03/agrichemical-lobby-already-laying-ground-work-next-parliament
▻http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/pesticides.jpeg?itok=TsNIUgI9

With the end of this Parliament’s term approaching – EU elections will take place in May this year – it seems that agrichemical corporations and their allies are using the few remaining voting opportunities left to have a couple of usefully-worded resolutions voted upon by this Parliament, a parliament which they know well and which has generally been rather supportive to their positions. This Parliament’s Agriculture Committee for instance had the worst position among all EU institutions in the whole debate about the Common Agriculture Policy, with the outcome that the EU’s biggest budget will keep funding the EU’s largest landowners as well as most destructive and harmful agricultural practices. These resolutions will probably be used as references to convince newly-elected MEPs.

A first example of this strategy is the resolution due to be voted upon by the European Parliament on Tuesday 11 March in Strasbourg on “the future of Europe’s horticulture sector – strategies for growth”. The text is based on a report by British Conservative MEP Anthea McIntyre who is a business intelligence consultant in the UK and was nominated to the European Parliament in 2011, following an increase in the total number of seats in the Parliament as foreseen by the Lisbon Treaty.

Her original text is a list of facts about the horticulture sector, notably the challenges this sector is facing in terms of increasing production costs, climate change impacts and the excessive market power of supermarkets in the whole supply chain, that get combined with the current talking points of the agrichemical industry about the need for intensifying production thanks to genetic engineering and new pesticides, if possible with extra public research funding. The list of all industry-friendly elements in her report actually reads as a good overview of industry’s wishlist these days:

to remove phytosanitary barriers impending exports to third-country markets, an important demand in the TTIP context;

to consider pesticides as an asset for the sector, particularly “minor uses”, thereby echoing an ongoing lobbying campaign by the pesticides lobby to get dedicated EU research funding to develop pesticides that the private companies in that sector do not want to develop themselves for, they say, lack of a large enough market to support development costs;

to only regulate pesticides when the scientific evidence is clear – which would exclude a precautionary approach when there is not enough scientific evidence to reach a firm conclusion (the report pays tribute to “peer-reviewed” and “independent” scientific literature though);

to be cautious about the impact on pesticides of the ongoing Commission initiative on endocrine disruptors on pesticides, a major fight in Brussels this year – the chemical lobby already won a first battle by getting the Commission to lead an impact assessment before any definition is even agreed on, which will delay and possibly weaken the whole process;

to lift the ongoing ban on neonicotinoid pesticides – a class of pesticides among the most toxic ever produced and that beekeepers blame for contributing to destroy bee colonies – by adding economic considerations in the risk assessment (short-term profits versus bees survival, choose your camp...);

to “recognise” that new genetic engineering breeding techniques such as cisgenesis are “not a form of genetic modification” and therefore require a different risk assessment regime than transgenesis, i.e. they should not be subjected to the same scrutiny;

to strengthen and extend research partnerships between governments, industry and academia, so that research in that sector is steered in an industry-friendly way.

Such an one-sided list might be explained by the origin of the lobbyists Mrs McIntyre met while preparing her report1. The names she disclosed all belong to the commercial sector, with the exception of one academic, the director of the Warwick Crop Centre (a UK university also working with industry). For the rest, the MEP almost exclusively met with lobbyists from the UK commercial agricultural sector:

the British Growers Association (vegetables growers’ lobby), the Horticulture Innovation Partnership (a UK platform involving businesses and research centres), Lantra (a UK company representing the land and environment commercial sectors), the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA, the UK lobby group representing the garden industry), the British Society of Plant Breeders (seed industry, representing most major multinationals of the sector) and twice the UK’s Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), a national professional association. The only non-UK group met on this was COPA-COGECA, the European umbrella association of national large farmers’ unions.

The McIntyre report was then modified through amendments in the Agriculture Committee, where the text was both improved and worsened: German Green MEP Martin Haüsling tabled many amendments related to the detrimental impacts of monoculture and the use of agrichemicals on soils quality and farms resilience, but Italian conservative MEP Herbert Dorfmann for instance sneaked in an amendment saying that standards used by supermarkets for maximum pesticide residues to minimise consumers exposure to these chemicals were “anticompetitive” and “detrimental to the interests of F[ruit]&V[egetable] growers”, calling the Commission to “put an end to such practices”. As a result, the text has become completely contradictory and no longer makes any sense, but this matters little to the agrichemical industry, as presumably their main focus is on ensuring their wishlist stays in the report so it can be quoted and referred to in the next Parliament: the final vote on this text next Tuesday will decide whether these industries will reach their goal or not.

However, such goals may have already been reached with another resolution tabled by MEP Marit Paulsen, a Swedish liberal. Voted on 25 February and opposed by only a third of the Parliament, the resolution contained very similar points to Macintyre’s report. It is aligned with the general "we need intensive chemical use to feed the world” message that the pesticides industry is putting forward in an effort to counter the growing public and environmental health concerns about its products. Among those points, the Paulsen resolution for instance:

– said that the ban of certain particularly damaging pesticides for minor uses (such as some horticulture crops) is having a “jeopardising” effect on the production of these crops, and that solutions have to be found.

– called for more support for so-called New Breeding Techniques, a term crafted by biotech companies to hide ’new’ GM crops produced with other genetic engineering techniques than transgenesis (such as cisgenesis, mutagenesis etc.). By saying that these techniques would not involve actual genetic modification, these companies are trying to get them excluded from the GM legislation altogether - Paulsen’s report actually stated that products should not be assessed based on the techniques with which they were produced.
– called for money from research program Horizon 2020 to be spent on the development of these techniques.

#agrichemical
#pesticides
#pesticide-lobby
#McIntyre

Food lobby fights labelling of nano ingredients | Corporate Europe Observatory
▻http://corporateeurope.org/agribusiness/2014/03/food-lobby-fights-labelling-nano-ingredients
▻http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/labelling_of_nano_in_food.jpg?itok=8T_RlMbk

A discreet but important lobbying battle is currently being fought in Brussels over the labelling of nano ingredients in food products. Nano food ingredients are made from materials at a scale so small that this gives them very interesting properties for a wide range of applications, but also raises largely unanswered questions about their health and environmental impacts, making consumer information a key parameter at this stage of the technology’s development. Some in the European Parliament are mobilising to reject a technical text by the Commission complementing a 2011 food regulation, because this text would exclude all existing food additives used in their nano form from being labelled. The food additives industry is lobbying MEPs with scare tactics, claiming that the Commission’s text is required to avoid labelling of foods that have been produced for decades with conventional processes such as mayonnaise or instant coffee. Yet in fact, this is misleading as the 2011 regulation already clearly states it only covers nano materials manufactured with the intention to obtain effects specific to the nano scale. The final vote in the Parliament will take place next Wednesday 12 March.

Nanomaterials are by definition materials whose size is in the nanometer scale (1-100 nm typically), the scale of most known viruses. Nanomaterials are increasingly attracting attention and research for a large range of applications – medical, military, industrial... – because the nanoscale often confers different properties to materials than they have in their bulk form. This difference however is also the source of great uncertainties about these compounds’s health and environmental impacts. Since many nanomaterials are already used in commercial products including food, labelling is seen as a way of giving a choice to consumers pending more research is done.

The EU’s 2011 Regulation on Food Information to Consumers (1169/2011, “FIC”) states that “All ingredients present in the form of engineered nanomaterials shall be clearly indicated in the list of ingredients. The names of such ingredients shall be followed by the word ’nano’ in brackets.” A rule that seems clear enough, yet the European Commission was delegated the power to define “engineered nanomaterials” more precisely. The Commission published its criteria, in a delegated act, in December 2013 to “amend and clarify” the 2011 Food Information Regulation.

The problem is that these new Commission criteria seem uniquely restrictive. The Commission’s Directorate General for Health and Consumers (SANCO), in charge of the file, came up with criteria so narrow that only new additives will be labeled, arguing that “indicating such food additives [ed: already approved in the EU] in the list of ingredients followed by the word ‘nano’ in brackets may confuse the consumers as it may suggest that those additives are new while in reality they have been used in foods in that form for decades”. This is in line with the lobbying of the food additives industry, which disingenously argues (see below) that unintentionally produced or naturally occurring nanoparticles will lead to unnecessary labelling of foods whose recipe hasn’t changed for decades.

#Food-lobby
#Lobbying
#nano
#labelling
#food
#scaremongering

No fracking way - how the EU-US trade agreement risks expanding fracking | Corporate Europe Observatory
▻http://corporateeurope.org/climate-and-energy/2014/03/no-fracking-way-how-eu-us-trade-agreement-risks-expanding-fracking
▻http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/gallery/dangers_of_fracking.jpg?itok=qhY8S3vZ

A trade deal between the EU and the US risks opening the backdoor for the expansion of fracking in Europe and the US, reveals a new report by Corporate Europe Observatory and other groups. As part of the deal currently being negotiated, energy companies could be allowed to take governments to private international tribunals if they attempt to regulate or ban fracking and the dangerous exploitation of unconventional fossil fuels. Campaigners are urging the EU not to include such rights in trade deals.

This brief analyses the investor rights clause in the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and how it could give special rights to companies to claim damages if they deem their investments (including future profits) are adversely affected by changes in regulation or policy.This would make it much harder for countries to ban or impose strong regulations on fracking for shale gas and other unconventional fossil fuels, for fear of having to pay millions in compensation. The report also argues that TTIP could expand fracking by removing the ability of governments to control natural gas exports.

More broadly, TTIP could likely thwart governments’ efforts to address global warming and reduce dependency on fossil fuels, the report states. It calls on the EU and the US to exclude investor-state dispute settlement rights from the agreement and from other trade deals in the pipeline – including the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA).

▻http://vimeo.com/88146142

No fracking way - how the EU-US trade agreement risks expanding fracking
March 6th 2014
Climate and Energy
Printer-friendly versionSend by emailPDF version

A trade deal between the EU and the US risks opening the backdoor for the expansion of fracking in Europe and the US, reveals a new report by Corporate Europe Observatory and other groups. As part of the deal currently being negotiated, energy companies could be allowed to take governments to private international tribunals if they attempt to regulate or ban fracking and the dangerous exploitation of unconventional fossil fuels. Campaigners are urging the EU not to include such rights in trade deals.

This brief analyses the investor rights clause in the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and how it could give special rights to companies to claim damages if they deem their investments (including future profits) are adversely affected by changes in regulation or policy.This would make it much harder for countries to ban or impose strong regulations on fracking for shale gas and other unconventional fossil fuels, for fear of having to pay millions in compensation. The report also argues that TTIP could expand fracking by removing the ability of governments to control natural gas exports.

More broadly, TTIP could likely thwart governments’ efforts to address global warming and reduce dependency on fossil fuels, the report states. It calls on the EU and the US to exclude investor-state dispute settlement rights from the agreement and from other trade deals in the pipeline – including the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA).

#fracking
#TTIP Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
#trade
#EU-US
#high-volume-hydraulic-fracturing
#ISDS
#EU-Canada
#CETA Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement

Belgian MEP in lobby amendments scandal | Corporate Europe Observatory
▻http://corporateeurope.org/publications/belgian-mep-lobby-amendments-scandal
▻http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/screenshot_-_221113_-_141302.png?itok=TEc-PC-u

Corporate Europe Observatory submits complaint for breach of the Code of Conduct for MEPs

Flemish television’s Panorama programme yesterday broadcasted an excellent documentary (Privacy for Sale) about the ‘lobbying war’ around the EU’s data protection directive. The documentary offers important insights into the often aggressive and deceptive ways in which industry, led by US digital giants such as Facebook and Amazon, tries to weaken the proposed legislation in order to continue profiting from virtually unrestricted use of online personal data. The documentary also exposes the problematic role of Belgian MEP Louis Michel (who was the EU’s Commissioner for development from 2004 to 2009). On the lobbyplag website (which tracks industry influence over MEPs on data protection issues), Michel ranks second of all MEPs in a “Top 10 for less Data Privacy in Europe”.

In the documentary, Michel is confronted with the fact that he has tabled no less than 229 amendments to the proposed legislation, including 158 that are strongly anti-privacy. Michel first angrily rejects the criticism, claiming he has never met with lobbyists. He then makes a u-turn and in a follow-up interview puts all the blame on his assistant. The assistant, Michel claims, had meetings with numerous lobby groups and submitted the industry amendments without the MEP knowing it. Asked if he will fire the assistant, Michel says he’s a humanist and that he will forgive him. The documentary ends with Michel announcing that he has withdrawn 80-90 of the amendments and thanking the programme makers for pointing out the problem. The documentary concludes that there are important unanswered questions and that it seems unbelievable that an assistant can manipulate the democratic process behind the back of an MEP.

The revelations about Michel’s amendments are big news in the Belgian media, with the discussion focusing on whether Michel really knew nothing about the amendments. The assistant Luc Paque, has yesterday offered his resignation and Michel has today announced that he accepts this. In an interview with Metro, Paque states that he “met people who presented their concerns to me. I have submitted those amendments in good faith. Louis Michel was not there and the deadlines had to be respected”. Among the ‘people’ Mr. Paque met with are the Belgian employers’ organisation VBO (part of the EU-wide industry federation BusinessEurope) and Agoria, the Belgian federation of technological industries. The amendments submitted by these lobby groups are likely to be part of a coordinated pan-European industry lobby effort.

Other Belgian MEPs heavily criticise Michel, pointing out that he is politically responsible for the amendments submitted in his name. Several point out that assistants can submit amendments electronically but that this always has to be followed by a paper version signed by the MEP. It is hard to believe that Louis Michel signed a pile of 229 amendments without knowing the content. Ivo Belet, MEP for the Christian Democratic CD&V, points out that MEPs should not submit amendments on issues that they don’t have expertise on or even time to read about. “Legislative work is the core of what a member of parliament must do, you should never outsource that. In that case better do nothing”, says Belet. Green MEP Bart Staes questions Michel’s version of the events and argues that knew about the amendments, but got cold feet when confronted with the fact that the amendments had been drafted by lobbyists. Staes sees the Michel case as yet another episode in an ongoing series of lobby incidents and calls for strengthening the European Parliament’s rules around lobbying.

The Michel scandal indeed highlights a bigger problem. As Corporate Europe Observatory has documented before, it is standard practice for many MEPs to submit amendments drafted by lobbyists, most often from industry. In some cases the majority of amendments voted on are not drafted by the MEPs, but by industry lobbyists. Examples include the Parliaments’ work on financial reform (regulation on derivatives and hedge funds) but also major environmental regulation like chemicals (REACH) or climate-disrupting F-gases. The 2011 cash-for-amendments scandal caused outrage over MEPs who were caught on camera accepting money in return for tabling pro-industry amendments. But also the widespread practice of submitting amendments written by industry lobbyists for free needs to be critically assessed. It is with this background that Corporate Europe Observatory has today submitted a complaint to the President of the European Parliament, arguing that Louis Michel has breached the Code of Conduct for MEPs.

complaint_louis_michel_code_of_conduct.pdf ...

#Privacy-for-Sale
#lobbying-war
#lobbying

Secret lobbying by law firms shows the need for a mandatory transparency register | Corporate Europe Observatory
▻http://corporateeurope.org/blog/secret-lobbying-law-firms-shows-need-mandatory-transparency-registe
▻http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2013-10-31_11.34.37_0.jpg?itok=ssM1nlLZ

The review of the EU’s Transparency Register for lobbyists is entering its crucial final phase. The working group on the register review - consisting of Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič and MEPs led by German Christian Democrat Rainer Wieland – is expected to make important decisions in a meeting on November 13th. The current register has several serious shortcomings that need fixing (as documented in an in-depth report by the ALTER-EU coalition in June), which is why ALTER-EU is running an urgent action to demand that the register is overhauled. But perhaps the most important is the continued boycott of the register by law firms that lobby. The credibility of the EU’s lobby register is at stake unless the law firms are forced to register.

In mid-October, the New York Times published one of the most important investigations this year into EU lobbying, exposing important facts about a little-known aspect of corporate lobbying in Brussels: the lobbying by a dozen or more international law firms, many of which are US companies. Eric Lipton and Danny Hakim, award-winning journalists, dug deep into the issues and managed to get law firm lobbyists to talk about their lobby successes. The article highlights lobbying by Hogan Lovells that led to a US semiconductor company being given an exemption to EU environmental law enabling it to continue using a potentially hazardous chemical substance. Lipton and Hakim show how Covington & Burling’s lobbying on behalf of pension funds prevented the introduction of restrictions on pension funds to invest in private equity. The law firm is now lobbying for oil companies like Chevron and Statoil to avoid restrictions on fracking. The article also describes how Baker Botts is gearing up to lobby to help companies weaken EU rules as part of EU-US trade negotiations (TTIP). These are just a few examples.

The article – a must-read for everyone with an interest in how the EU’s decisions are made – shows that large US law firms are active in Brussels lobbying in very much the same way as lobby consultancy firms, but with one significant difference. Whereas the majority of consultancies are registered, law firms continue to boycott the EU’s voluntary lobby transparency register and therefore do not disclose their clients or any other information about their lobbying. Five years after the Commission established the lobby register, virtually none of the law firms with Brussels lobby activities are registered. Law firms continue to claim that they are obliged to provide client confidentiality (something that is true when it comes to defending clients in court cases, but obviously not when it concerns a completely unrelated lucrative side-business that these firms have developed: lobbying).

The boycott by law firms reveals the weakness of the voluntary approach of the EU’s Transparency Register. In the US, where lobby disclosure is a legal obligation, law firms are registered and in fact they dominate the list of biggest spenders in lobbying. Hogan Lovells and Covington & Burling are both in the top-20, with a lobbying turnover of US$9.2 and US$8.7 million respectively in the first three quarters of 2013, as fresh data from the US register shows. In the US, the lobby register was voluntary until 1995, when lawmakers opted for a mandatory register, precisely because law firms continued to refuse to sign up under the voluntary model. The lesson for EU decision-makers should be easy to draw, but unfortunately there is little appetite for making registration mandatory....

#Transparency-Register
#lobbying
#law
#firms
#économy

Dirty business in Warsaw | Corporate Europe Observatory
▻http://corporateeurope.org/blog/dirty-business-warsaw

As the warm-up climate talks in Warsaw end, the message from the Polish government is clear: big companies get privileged access to negotiators, but NGOs are excluded.

▻http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/marcin-korolec-source-council-fo-the-european-union-466px_3.jpg?ito

Next month countries will gather in Warsaw for the latest round of climate negotiations but the exclusion of civil society, while business gets full access, has already begun at the warm-up talks, ending today (4th October 2013).

The UN climate talks, or COP19 (the 19th Conference of the Parties under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – UNFCCC), will be presided over by the Polish government, and in particular the Polish Minister for Environment, Marcin Korolec (see picture, right).

Minister Korolec has been at pains to emphasise that the UN climate talks this year in Poland will be business-friendly. At a press conference on 15th September he said:

▻http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/cop19_partners_logos_1.png?itok=88Ec98j1

“For the first time in 19 years, since the climate talks have been held, representatives of global business will be a part of it"
So what does this mean? Future blog posts will investigate exactly what role the Polish government sees for business, and why some of the dirtiest corporations like ArcelorMittal (steel giant with severe impacts in many communities around the world and the company which has pocketed more assets than anyone else in the EU carbon market (the emissions trading scheme)), BMW (active lobbyists against car CO2 emission reductions) and Lotos, (Polish oil company promoting shale gas exploration), are official COP19 partners.

#Poland
#Dirty-business
#COP19
#UNFCCC

EU lobby register review : Parliament vice-president for transparency opposed to improved transparency ? | Corporate Europe Observatory
▻http://corporateeurope.org/blog/eu-lobby-register-review-parliament-vice-president-transparency-opp

At Corporate Europe Observatory, we’ve been receiving a lot of questions recently about the current review of the EU’s lobby transparency register, from NGOs, students and journalists: do we know how it is going, what are our expectations? It’s hardly surprising that there are questions: the review process so far has happened with virtually no transparency. There is no webpage to refer to for basic information such as who are the MEPs that are negotiating with the Commission about the review, which key issues are they discussing and what is their deadline, let alone any of the documents discussed in the working group. The ALTER-EU coalition and Transparency International have repeatedly argued that a process which is aimed at boosting transparency should be transparent itself, but so far with no result.
▻http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/maxresdefault.jpg?itok=pcySPW8P
What we’ve heard through the grapevine about the working group meetings is that there’s not a lot of appetite for ambitious transparency reforms, such as replacing the voluntary register with mandatory registration or introducing far more comprehensive disclosure by lobbyists. This is at least partly due to the composition of the group. Parliament President Schulz is said to have insisted that the group should consist only of members of the Bureau (which consists of the Parliament’s 14 Vice-Presidents), which has meant that a range of MEPs who most actively promote transparency reforms have not been allowed in. The chair of the working group is Rainer Wieland MEP who is also the European Parliament’s vice-president responsible for transparency but who is in fact developing a worrying reputation as a transparency-skeptic.

During a public debate on International Right to Know Day (27 September), Wieland - to the bemusement of much of the audience - used most of his speech to warn against further transparency reforms. Wieland failed to comment on the deep structural problems with the current transparency register, which had been outlined by a previous speaker from the ALTER-EU coalition. He argued that the review of the transparency register needed to happen ’without MEPs publishing a press release every day’. It’s hard to see what Wieland is so concerned about: so far not a single press release has been published by any of the MEP members of the working group. What is so dangerous and wrong about public debate about how best to improve EU lobby transparency? One can only guess. When asked by the event moderator what his ambitions for the review of the register were, Wieland mentioned only two points: increasing the number of registrants and getting the EU Council involved. Now these are both not unimportant, but the single quickest way to increase the number of registrants would be to make the register mandatory and to force those who lobby in the shadows out into the clarifying light of transparency. And this is not a particularly radical position; in fact it is the European Parliament’s agreed position, as expressed in a plenary vote in May 2011. ...

#lobby
#transparency
#MEP

The anniversary of broken promises | Corporate Europe Observatory
▻http://corporateeurope.org/financial-lobby/2013/09/anniversary-broken-promises

The anniversary of broken promises

▻http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/dollar_by_reubenaingber.jpg?itok=gsASBkAR

September 13th 2013 The financial lobby

5 years after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, and the beginning of the worst economic crisis in decades, the EU has not delivered on promises of strong regulation of the financial sector. A swift overhaul is needed. Together with other organisations (full list at the end), CEO has signed the statement below. 

The 15th of September marks the fifth anniversary of the most spectacular bankruptcy in the financial crisis of 2007-2008. On that day, renowned Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy due to disastrous investments in US real estate through financial products. At the time, European leaders made bold promises to reform financial regulation in the EU “to respond to crises, but also to avoid them in the future”, Commission President Barroso said. Five years on, the results are woefully insufficient.

The financial crisis led to a devastating economic crisis in Europe. Unemployment in the EU has increased steadily to a record level of nearly 26 million – a staggering 10.7% of the labour force with youth unemployment much higher. It also set the euro crisis in motion which has resulted in painful austerity measures in almost all EU countries and hundreds of billions of euros in expensive bailouts of banks that made bad loans in the first place. Having paid such a high price, European citizens have every right to demand effective action from politicians to protect us from a repeat of this meltdown. But after five years of financial ‘reform’ in the EU, the return on our investment is woefully inadequate.

The evidence is clear: European banks continue to be undercapitalised, and EU banking regulation continues to allow banks – such as Deutsche Bank and Barclays – to borrow even more than Lehman Brothers did before it crashed1; derivatives markets continue to grow and now stand at a value much higher than five years ago2; few toxic financial instruments have been banned, not even the complicated securities that played a key role in the crisis.

One key reason for this failure is the success of the financial lobby to keep effective regulation at bay. The financial industry is spending millions to influence decision makers, and scaremongering is their standard argument: they claim that regulating finance would be costly to society in terms of unemployment. However, this is an absurd argument if one looks at the costs of the crisis in 2008, regarding bank bail outs and millions of people losing their jobs.

Financial corporations have enjoyed uninterrupted privileged access to decision makers, for instance in the debate on new rules on banking and on derivatives. As pointed out repeatedly by the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation in the EU (ALTER-EU) and others, advisory groups of the Commission and the Council were, and are still, dominated by representatives from big financial corporations. A group recently set up to advice the EU on measures to stop tax evasion is full with representatives of the same accountancy industry that is so instrumental in advising companies how they can minimize their tax payments.

#Lehman_Brothers
#financial_industry is spending millions to influence decision makers
#investment is woefully inadequate.
#financial_lobby
to #stop_tax evasion
#regulation of the financial sector
#ftt
#too_big_to_fail
#speculation
#anniversary
#bankruptcy

European Commission preparing for EU-US trade talks: 119 meetings with industry lobbyists | Corporate Europe Observatory
▻http://corporateeurope.org/trade/2013/09/european-commission-preparing-eu-us-trade-talks-119-meetings-indust

▻http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/meetings_with_stakeholders.jpg?itok=yneUHDUZ

In response to an access to documents request from Corporate Europe Observatory, the European Commission has released a list of 130 ‘meetings with stakeholders’ on the EU-US free trade talks. At least 119 meetings were with large corporations and their lobby groups. This means that more than 93% of the Commission’s meetings with stakeholders during the preparations of the negotiations were with big business. The list of meetings reveals that, in addition to the civil society dialogue meetings reported on the DG Trade website, there is a parallel world of a very large number of intimate meetings with big business lobbyists behind closed doors - and these are not disclosed online.

Negotiations on an EU-US ‘free trade’ agreement (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP) started in July this year amid strong controversy and public concern about the impacts such an agreement could have on environmental regulations, food standards, data protection and other issues. The European Commission, which represents the EU in the negotiations, has reacted with a propaganda offensive that includes a Q&A website full of misleading claims about the TTIP talks and a ‘@EU_TTIP_team’ that counters critical messages on twitter. In mid-July, the Commission made a huge deal out of the civil society dialogue it had organised in Brussels on the TTIP talks, posting dozens of tweets about the event, praising the “interesting discussion” on issues such as “the environment, transparency, development” with “as many questions from NGOs [...] than there were from Industry”.

The event also features prominently on the website of the Commission’s trade department (DG Trade), in the ‘Dialogues’ section where the Commission states that it aims for “a transparent and accountable trade policy based on consultations with all parts of European civil society”. But what is disclosed on the website is only a tiny part of the meetings that DG Trade has with ‘stakeholders’.

In April, Corporate Europe Observatory submitted an access to documents request in order to get an overview of the Commission’s contacts with industry, in the context of the preparations for the EU-US trade talks. The Commission’s first response was to ask us to "narrow down the scope” of the request, because it “concerns a very large number of documents”. Three months later the first result arrived: a list of 130 ‘meetings with stakeholders’ that took place between January 2012 and April 2013.1 A few weeks later another five meetings were added to this list. DG Trade has informed us that the minutes and other reports of these 135 meetings, as well as correspondence between DG trade and industry lobbies, will be released later, but that they “cannot yet commit to a specific date”.

#EU-US
#European_Commission
#TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership)
#NGOs #ONG

The battle to keep water out of the internal market - a test case for democracy in Europe
▻http://www.corporateeurope.org/blog/battle-keep-water-out-internal-market-test-case-democracy-europe

The European Commission has in recent weeks gone on a PR offensive in response to growing criticism of its pro-privatisation agenda for the water sector. The criticism centres around the water privatisation conditions attached to the Troika’s rescue packages for Greece and Portugal, and the proposed EU concessions directive, which could lead to increased privatisation pressure on public water municipalities across Europe.

http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/884592_530172300359891_1714712624_o.jpg