Slowing down revolving doors

Anyone looking for evidence of the cosy relationship between Eurocrats and corporate suits could do worse than stand by the ‘revolving door’ leading out of the European Commission to the private sector.

Here, one can observe commissioners and high-ranking civil servants spilling out into the offices of well-known consultancies and corporations to be greeted by figures they may first have shaken hands with back in their old directorate-general.

In 1999, months after the fall of the Jacques Santer Commission, acting industry commissioner Martin Bangemann announced that he was joining Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica. These days, such delicate matters may be handled more elegantly, but Brussels’s ‘revolving door’ still serves large numbers of civil servants making their way out of the institutions into highly paid private sector jobs.

Andrew Cahn, who had been head of cabinet to Neil Kinnock when he was European commissioner for transport, went to a senior post with British Airways in 2000. Francisco-Enrique González Diaz went from heading a unit of the Commission’s merger task force to the Brussels office of law firm Cleary Gottlieb. The same firm had already recruited John Temple Lang, who was a director in the Commission’s competition department. Last year, when the law firm Howrey recruited Götz Drauz as a partner, it boasted that he was "until very recently" deputy director-general for competition in the Commission. With a little less haste, Alexander Schaub, who was director-general for competition and then director-general for the internal market until June 2006 joined Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in February 2007.

The flow of staff from government jobs to the private sector and vice-versa is not in itself objectionable, say watchdogs. To a certain extent, the transfer of expertise between the public and private sector could be seen as a healthy trend, bringing bureaucrats closer to the real world and helping to demystify the often-obscure machinations of government. Comparing Brussels to Washington, where the revolving door phenomenon is virtually institutionalised, the temptation might be to write off European concerns as needlessly puritanical.

Over the past couple of years, however, US practices have come under increasing scrutiny in the wake of the 2005 Jack Abramoff affair, an influence-peddling scandal leading from K Street, the heart of Washington’s lobbying industry, all the way to the White House. The ensuing crisis of legitimacy engendered the "Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007", a wide-ranging bill which would increase the cooling-off period for which former officials are banned from lobbying old colleagues from one year to two years. The act, which is awaiting President George W. Bush’s signature, could come into effect at the end of the year.

Back in Europe, watchdogs are concerned about the absence of mandatory conditions attached to transfers between business and EU institutions. Siim Kallas, the anti-fraud commissioner, did not take up the issue in his green paper on the European Transparency Initiative last year, stressing that staff have to inform the European Commission of plans to take up paid employment elsewhere and are, in any case, bound by internal rules on professional integrity. Watchdogs would like to know exactly what those rules are.

The Amsterdam-based watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) advocates a tightening of rules to limit revolving door practices where there are possible conflicts of interest. "It’s very important to take away the impression some outsiders have, that they are being rewarded for previous services. That’s how people would interpret it," says Erik Wesselius, CEO campaigner and researcher. Internal committees should be charged with examining cases, he says, particularly where institutional staff wish to take up jobs relating to their area of expertise.

Non-governmental organisations complain that the private sector gains an unfair advantage from the appointment of mandarins such as former enterprise director-general Jean-Paul Mingasson, who then became general adviser at the European employers’ federation BusinessEurope. The example of former environment director-general Jim Currie, who left the Commission in 2002 to join British Nuclear Fuels Limited, was also singled out by groups. A cooling-off period was ordained by the Commission in the latter case.

Daniel Guéguen, chief executive of Clan Public Affairs, speaks of a "deep need for regulation", not least because mandarins who might have been privy to sensitive information on his consultancy could impart knowledge to direct competitors. "It’s absolutely unacceptable that civil servants move from the Commission to the public domain," he says. "Top level civil servants defend white at the Commission and then black when they become consultants."

Anyone looking for evidence of the cosy relationship between Eurocrats and corporate suits could do worse than stand by the ‘revolving door’ leading out of the European Commission to the private sector.