The spreading cash-for-amendments affair at the European Parliament is a juicy one, for sure. Three members agreed to accept money from journalists posing as banking lobbyists, Britain’s Sunday Times wrote.
Despite the more-than-generous salary they receive and the presumption that their job is to represent the public interest rather than any private positions, the Sunday Times said the three politicians were ready to water down, twist, and variously polish a piece of banking legislation to suit the wishes of the fake company. But there’s also a brighter side to the story.
First the figures. One of the journalists involved in the setup told me he and his colleagues contacted around 100 of the 754 lawmakers – by email, telephone, or letter. About 50 declined any cooperation from the start while the other half required further information. Most backed off when told the offer concerned a paid consultancy on behalf of a private company. Still, 14 politicians were ready to go down the road.
In the end, “four or five” agreed to help the company in return for 100,000 euros per annum. One even contacted the fake company to report that he had already put forward an amendment that would satisfy its needs.
Four or five out of 100 works out to a “sin index” of 4 to 5 percent. When the Czech daily Mlada fronta Dnes tried a similar expose two years ago – reporters claiming to represent a betting company lobbied Czech parliamentarians to change a lottery bill then on the table – they contacted about 10 lawmakers and three, recorded on a hidden camera, agreed to help for 1 million crowns, about 40,000 euros. The Czechs scored 30 percent on our sin index, quite a difference compared with 4 to 5 percent.
These may of course be only random results – the next attempt to catch Brussels lawmakers in the act might find more willing to accept outside money, just as another Czech snare might round up fewer deputies ready to do the same. It only shows that things like this happen everywhere. Case in point: the extensive scandal over the misuse of parliamentary expense accounts in Britain.
The three sinners were an Austrian, a Slovenian, and a Romanian. The geographical spread is also only a coincidence. The Sunday Times reporter told me the paper didn’t choose candidates for the scam by country or party. Their criterion was “senior politician” – someone with prior experience in a legislature or government before coming to Brussels, someone who would have come into contact with lobbyists in the past and should know the rules of the game.
And these were indeed senior figures: former Austrian Interior Minister Ernst Strasser, former Slovenian Foreign Minister Zoran Thaler, and a former deputy premier of Romania, Adrian Severin. All of them experienced and well-known, one from the Christian Democratic camp, the other two Socialists.
Strasser and Thaler both resigned shortly after the story broke; Severin was expelled from the Socialist group in the parliament but has been refusing to give up his seat since. He insists that his contract with the fake lobbyists was legal and that there was no conflict of interest on his part because he shared their views on the regulation in question.
Technically, Severin is right. Lawmakers in Brussels are permitted to engage in various profit-generating activities as long as they declare them in the register of members’ financial interests (they did not record this particular contract because it came into force after one filing deadline and was revealed as phony before the next). And if they find themselves in a conflict of interest, they only have to say so – for example, if a member of the parliament who owns a farm wishes to speak about the EU’s agricultural policy, he or she needs merely to acknowledge the fact, and that’s it. No other rules regulating lobbying, conflicts of interest, or protection of the public interest exist for the European Parliament.
The Sunday Times reporter said that many of the members contacted had no idea they might be doing anything wrong. In part, this reflects the variety of practices in handling lobbyists across Europe. It may well be that what a Brit sees as over the line a Czech or an Austrian would judge to be perfectly fine.
The European Parliament is porous for lobbyists, and where senior politicians should at least have some notion of how to behave around the information merchants, many members have less experience in these matters.
It all points to a crying need for firm and legally binding rules for the protection of the public – or voters’ if you like – interest over the private concerns of their representatives in the European Parliament. This would clear the air in the assembly, discipline the members, and possibly even make the place a model of ethical behavior.
The assembly’s chairman, Jerzy Buzek, has already called for such rules to be drafted “without delay.” If he cracks the whip over party leaders, and if more stories like the Sunday Times expose break (one already has, when the same paper last weekend linked a Spanish member to the cash-for-amendments scandal), we may see the day when the members become a more civilized crowd. The current scandal might then have served a very useful purpose.
This column was originally published on the Transitions Online website (www.tol.org) on 28 March, 2011 . Transitions Online covers political, economic and social developments in Central & Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Central Asia.
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