Spotlight: EU lawmakers demand higher standards for Commissioner conduct

In a nearly unanimous vote, the European Parliament on Thursday called on the European Commission to substantially revise its code of conduct for Commissioners.

Members of European Parliament (MEPs) demanded that special attention be given to the disclosure of financial interests and the "cooling off" period before an ex-Commissioner may take a private sector job in his or her area of expertise.

They called for the "cooling off" period to be doubled from 18 to 36 months for former Commissioners, despite European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker's recent proposal of prolonging it to 24 months.

Adopted by a remarkable 615 votes in favor to 5 against, with 6 abstentions, the non-binding resolution runs in line with recent public discontent regarding so-called "revolving door" cases, in which former senior European Union (EU) officials have accepted private sector jobs shortly after leaving their posts, leading to questions of conflicts of interest.

The high profile "revolving door" case, involving former European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, who was appointed last summer as non-executive chairman of the U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs International, led to a large public outcry and intense scrutiny of how the Commission handles conflict of interest cases.

Barroso received fierce criticism, with even his successor, current Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, questioning the ethics of Barroso's decision in a video interview published by the Commission in September, and going so far as to suggest that Goldman Sachs was a contributor to the financial crisis that began in 2007.

In his defense, Barroso wrote to Juncker in September denying unethical behavior, calling the claims "baseless and wholly unmerited... discriminatory against me and against Goldman Sachs."

The bank noted that Barroso had observed an 18-month restriction period after leaving office at the European Commission before taking the job.

EU staff have seemingly been unconvinced, however, with more than 150,000 signing a petition in October asking that Barroso be stripped of his pension.

The European Parliament, for its part, adopted a resolution on Nov. 24 asking the European Ombudsman, Emily O'Reilly, who investigates complaints about maladministration in the institutions and bodies of the European Union, to open an inquiry into the European Commission's handling of Barroso's Goldman Sachs appointment.

In Thursday's resolution, however, MEPs demonstrated that that the scope for conflicts of interest in policy-making were much broader.

In addition to the doubling of the "cooling off" period, the parliamentarians asked that the code of conduct revisions require better declarations of interests in order to give a full picture of the financial situation and activities of Commissioners and their families.

"The recent revelations about the activities of some former Commissioners not only hamper the image of the European Commission but that of the whole European Union," said Tadeusz Zwiefka, vice-chairman of the European People's Party group (EPP) and the group's spokesman on Legal Affairs.

The EPP spokesman's comments were complemented by those of his Socialists and Democrats group (S&D) counterpart, Evelyn Regner.

"We support a zero-tolerance approach towards conflicts of interest. Today we have backed measures that would ensure greater scrutiny from the Parliament over Commissioners' appointments and would ensure that measures can be taken when a conflict of interest is present," Regner said.

The financial interests declaration should include present or past interests, or activities from the two years prior, the resolution stated.

The European Parliament also recommended that Commissioners should declare all interests as "shareholders, company board members, advisers and consultants, members of associated foundations," in addition to close family interests any changes occurring once their candidacies were made public.

Should a conflict of interest become clear while a Commissioner is in office, the Commission President should follow guidance from the European Parliament on how to resolve the conflict, or MEPs might recommend withdrawing confidence in the Commissioner in question and, when appropriate, depriving him or her the rights to a pension and other benefits, according to the resolution.

The resolution also called for a greater role for the Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee in analyzing the financial interest declarations, fulfilling a supervisory role, and clearance on conflicts of interest from the committee should be a precondition for the hearing of the Commissioner-delegate to be held by the committee responsible for the future portfolio.

The most recent revision of the code of conduct for European Commissioners was published in Brussels in April 2011, while Barroso was still EU president. Endit