The EU must become more transparent if it is to revive its fortunes

24/4/2014

The greatest corruption risks in EU institutions are the undeclared conflicts of interest of bureaucrats and lawmakers

When Transparency International conducted its new study on corruption risks in EU institutions, we discovered little evidence of old-style backhanders and kickbacks, but what we did discover is far more shocking in one sense – a system of shadow decision-making that makes the process of drafting legislation vulnerable to corruption and special interests. Tackling these transparency blindspots has to be the first priority of the new EU leadership before corruption risks turn into corruption scandals.

Like all political power centres, Brussels is a magnet for lobbyists of all stripes. Some sense of the scale of all this can be gleaned from the EU lobby register, where just over 6,500 businesses, trade unions, NGOs and professional lobbyists have supplied basic information on what they do and how much they spend.

The register is an innovative piece of work – there are few such examples in national capitals – but unfortunately it only provides a facade of transparency. The truth is that, even to the estimated 15,000 lobbyists who make it their business to know how EU law-making works, just how and why decisions are made is often a mystery.

We saw this at first hand when we worked on transparency proposals for the oil and gas industry in recent years. At various stages in the process, egregious exemptions for companies were inserted into the text or corporate positions became official positions for reasons that were unclear and certainly not explained.

As our new report on the transparency, accountability and integrity of EU institutions makes clear, this is part of a disturbing trend. While the institutions are formally bound by strict transparency standards, real decision-making has fled to the shadows, leaving it vulnerable to corruption and special interests.

The attempt to speed up the pace of EU lawmaking has had the effect of carving out spaces free from the glare of public scrutiny. This is most apparent in the so-called "trilogue" negotiations, the informal meetings of representatives of the European commission, European parliament and EU council, where the majority of EU laws are drafted. There is no public record of these meetings and they are beyond the reach of hard-won transparency requirements.

This trend toward informal decision-making might not be so disturbing if it was accompanied by effective anti-corruption controls, but again our report shows how the institutions as a whole fall short. Despite reams of ethics rules on paper, the system is let down by poor checks and controls which, if they exist at all, tend to be tick-box affairs. There is no comprehensive verification of the financial interests declared by MEPs or senior commission officials, despite the commission calling on national governments to introduce these controls.

When MEPs and others are found to have made inaccurate or incomplete declarations, such as in the case of a former Belgian prime minister who neglected to mention shares worth an estimated €5.3m, no sanctions are applied, which undermines the credibility of the whole system.

This matters because the greatest corruption risks in EU institutions are the undeclared conflicts of interest of bureaucrats and lawmakers alike, which increase the likelihood that EU rules are skewed in favour of special interests. In the wake of the Cresson scandal in the 1990s, the EU has done much to tighten the rules preventing the cruder types of graft, and indeed reported instances of bribe-taking or bribe-seeking by EU officials are very rare (although the poor standard of protection afforded to whistleblowers may also be a factor).

The usual response of EU decision-makers to these blindspots is: "Trust us. Judge us by our results. If you don't like them, you will have your say at the next elections." But the public has less and less trust in both politicians and bureaucrats, and indeed 70% of EU citizens think there is corruption present in EU institutions, according to the commission's own surveys. This response fails to take into account the sheer complexity of EU decision-making, which requires real-time accountability rather than the rather crude verdict that elections offer.

The other response is to say that the EU institutions are no worse, and in some cases better, than national administrations. This is true, but EU institutions cannot afford this kind of complacency. Without the same deep roots and engagement that most national institutions enjoy, the EU needs to bolster its legitimacy with a policy of "transparency by default". Delivering such a message ahead of the European elections should be the first thought of any candidate who hopes to revive the EU's fortunes after the existential struggles of the past five years.

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