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By SARAH WHEATON
PRESENTED BY
Tips, tales, traumas to @swheaton or influence@politico.eu | View in your browser
HOWDY. Welcome to this week’s edition of EU Influence, where we’ve just come across an AI-generated profile of your newsletter author. And, ya know, it’s not the worst. A PR bot named Preston notes that we “bring a wealth of experience” to our role. Thanks for the recognition, Preston!
More precision, please, Preston: “She is likely to be interested in pitches related to EU legislative developments or political events that have implications for the region,” Preston suggests. I mean, yes, sure. But do better. We propose: “She is likely to be interested in pitches revealing scoops, hot bubble gossip, controversial-but-well-argued takes, and fun, low-effort newsletter fodder during slow news weeks. Also, party invitations.”
THE DO’S AND DON’TS OF DISCLOSURE
THE CYNIC’S GUIDE TO PARLIAMENT FILINGS: Are you an MEP who wants to maximize outside earnings while minimizing political accountability? Are you worried that the more precise disclosures demanded by the post-Qatargate requirements will hurt your re-election chances by exposing your wealth and/or conflicts of interest? Then this guide to best practices — inspired by Transparency International EU’s recent analysis of your colleagues’ disclosures — is for you.
DO: Get an NDA — What supersedes your contract with the electorate, the Code of Conduct? It’s your contract with your outside employer. Sure, the new rules say you need to declare exactly how much you make from side gigs yielding more than €5,000 a year, but at least two MEPs exempted themselves by citing confidentiality clauses.
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German EPP MEP Axel Voss lists only an income range for his compensation for board memberships — he earns between €1,001 and €5,000 a month with the law firm Beitmann, for example — meaning we learned nothing new about him compared to the Parliament’s previous income disclosure system. The non-disclosure agreements were “initiated by the employer prior to the disclosure requirements,” Voss said in a statement. The issue has been flagged to the institution’s administration, he added, which recommended listing the salary range.
Sarah Wiener, an Austrian Green MEP, used similar rationale to reveal even less than before. While she once disclosed getting up to €499 a month for a newspaper column and newsletter, now the former celebrity chef provides no figures at all for things like a cookbook, TV appearances and that newspaper column, citing secrecy clauses.
“It concerns cooking columns, it’s not a conflict of interest,” said a Wiener spokesperson.
Wiener’s culinary projects, indeed, are hardly in the same category as regulatory consulting. Yet transparency has been a signature issue for her fellow Greens in the Parliament, who played a key role in pushing the more precise disclosures into practice. A group spokesman pointed to the Greens’ policy on transparency, which bars Green MEPs from getting paid by interests falling under the scope of the Transparency Register.
DON’T: Create a ‘consultancy’ — Marek Belka, Socialists & Democrats MEP, reports earning more than €21,000 annually giving speeches for “M Consultancy,” which belongs to him. So we had to ask: Is he giving speeches and training to clients?
No, he said unequivocally. As a former Polish prime minister and finance minister, he’s in demand at home. But the speeches, about every other month, are about “macroeconomic policy and economic trends in the world,” he said.
M Consulting doesn’t actually do any consulting. It’s just the corporate entity for his speechifying.
“I really regret my choice of name,” Belka said in an email, saying it’s “totally misleading.”
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DON’T: Double-state your income —This is another own-goal to be avoided. Filling the form out correctly is essential. Finnish S&D Vice Chair Eero Heinäluoma reported his €28,700 in annual income as chairman of the Tradeka “owner’s cooperative” in two separate categories. That led TI EU’s Integrity Watch data scraper to read the form correctly and count it twice, making Heinäluoma much higher up on the side-earner rankings than he actually is (and thus catching the eye of POLITICO Pro’s Financial Services team).
Heinäluoma complained about inaccuracies to POLITICO and to TI EU, and has now updated his filing. The mistake was the result of genuine confusion because the income seemed relevant for two different categories, he told EU Influence in a follow-up message, stressing that he has always been fastidious about transparency throughout his term.
But — as we told Sandro Gozi and Radosław Sikorski when they were mad about unflattering coverage resulting from their erroneous pre-2021 disclosures — filing these forms correctly is your responsibility.
Put righteously: Don’t blame the watchdogs for running with your bad numbers, even if they result from an abundance of caution.
Put cynically: If in doubt, leave it out. In the machine-reading era, you’re less likely to draw scrutiny for a blank field than for over-reporting.
MAYBE: Use old and ambiguous data to attack your opponents — On Friday, top French Left MEP Manon Aubry issued a broadside of a tweet against multiple opponents:
As you can see, the X-sphere jumped in to complain that she was conflating people getting paid by their publishers with people getting paid by lobbyists. But savvy readers can see Aubry was also using out-of-date data.
She cites the TI EU database, Integrity Watch, to cite a range of figures. Aubry, a vocal transparency advocate, surely knew that more accurate figures were available on the Parliament’s website (though she has not replied to EU Influence’s question). And she got in just under the wire: Integrity Watch was updated to reflect the more precise filings the following Monday. (While reporters knew this update was coming, TI EU said they did not communicate with Aubry about it. A disclaimer on the site, posted April 29, said an update was coming.)
Aubry provoked furious retorts from opponents and press, with Valérie Hayer, head of the Renew list, threatening to sue for defamation. (Her side income comes from a local government post.) The controversy has kept Aubry — and her complaints about corporate capture of the European Parliament — in the French headlines since then.
DO: Shrug it off — So you get dinged by POLITICO or Euronews for an apparent conflict of interest. So what? Politically, you’re probably better off being less like Hayer and more like Monika Hohlmeier. The German EPP MEP makes €75,000 on the board of BayWa, an agriculture and energy company that’s in the Transparency Register. Rather than dodge the topic, Hohlmeier has submitted amendments on agri issues. Yet it’s not a potential conflict, she told Euronews; rather, it’s a virtue. “It’s very important that MEPs also engage in society and business to a responsible degree,” she said.
Hohlmeier’s approach is one way of doing it. Another is to just ignore questions completely, as French EPP MEP Geoffroy Didier continues to do with our questions about his legal work.
ON THE RECORD
“Did COP28 improve the image of the UAE? No. And the Emiratis are much better at dealing with international audiences, they have more money being spent on lobbying, they’re more used to working with the West and have much more experience than Azerbaijan.”
— Kadri Tastan, a European affairs and climate specialist with the German Marshall Fund, on why Baku’s bid to boost its reputation by hosting the next global climate conference might backfire. Read more.
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COURT ORDERS
SUNLIGHT THROUGH THE PRISON BARS: Be more transparent — especially when it involves the public money you give to an MEP who has been convicted, arrested and imprisoned for partaking in a criminal organization, said EU’s top judges to the Parliament in a decision this week. Spotted by my colleague Elisa Braun, the General Court is giving a win to transparency advocates from German NGO FragdenStaat, who had brought the case after the Parliament refused to grant them access to documents about this unprecedented situation.
Only in the European Parliament: Greek MEP Ioannis Lagos was handed a prison sentence in 2020 for his role in a criminal organization, along with the other leaders of the neo-Nazi political party Golden Dawn. Yet he remained a Member of the European Parliament — he won POLITICO’s UnAward for being MIA — and therefore continued to receive allowances corresponding to the exercise of his parliamentary duties, the ruling explains.
Seems like a legit question to us: “In that context, the fact that the citizens may seek to ascertain for what purpose and to which places Mr Lagos and his parliamentary assistants made journeys during a period in which Mr Lagos had already been convicted but not yet imprisoned and which were reimbursed by the Parliament must be regarded as legitimate,” the Court said. The Parliament can still appeal the decision.
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PUBLIC HEALTH NGO GETS SICKER: The precipitous disintegration of the European Public Health Alliance (EPHA) from go-to NGO to circular firing squad is getting more intense, POLITICO’s Mari Eccles reports.
Quick refresher: EPHA’s board has seen a cascade of departures amid charges of nepotism and harassment. There’s an outside audit, but people say they don’t trust it. The director general is accused of hiring her husband for a plum gig. A different outside investigator is considering claims that an ex-board member harassed the director general. Etc.
The latest: An “accountability” report published last week boasted a “tightly knit, fit-for-purpose, functional team,” “watertight funding and governance,” and “top notch advocacy.”
Read the room: That went down very badly with attendees of last week’s meeting of members, given it dropped just as they were expecting to be briefed on findings from Belgian law firm Thales into allegations of mismanagement, nepotism, and a toxic work culture at the NGO. But EPHA members were told that only the board (which is currently made up of three people following a slew of resignations earlier this year) would have access to the full thing.
More questions than answers: It also left members confused about the departure of Aleksandar Sokolović, who until last week worked as operations manager at EPHA. His original hiring had come under scrutiny because he is the husband of the director general, Milka Sokolović. EPHA didn’t respond when we asked why he left.
What they did say: In a separate statement, EPHA’s president said the investigation found no evidence to back up the nepotism and workplace harassment charges — though Thales did recommend management and comms changes.
But that begs the question: What did the investigation actually find? And why did it lead to Aleksandar Sokolović’s departure? Thales has yet to reply.
The other big question: People with knowledge of last week’s meeting told Mari that Milka Sokolović’s future as director general has been called into question. In a statement, the board “reiterate[d] its support and confidence” in all staff, management and the director general.
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INFLUENCERS
AGRI-FOOD
— Hans van Bochove joined Heineken as head of EU affairs. He was previously with the Coca-Cola Company.
CHEMICALS
— Ilham Kadri, CEO of Syensqo, is Cefic’s new president, succeeding former BASF CEO Martin Brudermueller.
CIVIL SOCIETY
— Iverna McGowan recently became a tech and human rights advisor at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. She was previously with the Center for Democracy & Technology.
CONSULTING & COMMS
— Round of promotions at BCW Brussels: Ekaterina Iarkova has been promoted to director; Kieran Chandler and Reto Schlegel to account director; Elena Ammattatelli to account manager; and Bernat Graell Artigas, Gabriele Nicosia, Hugo Vincent Duran and Simon Dutré to senior account executive.
EUROPEAN COUNCIL
— Magdalena Grono, a senior foreign policy adviser in Council President Charles Michel’s cabinet, will become his new chief diplomatic adviser, succeeding Simon Mordue.
DEFENSE
— Blagoj Delipetrev started at NATO as AI adviser and Science For Peace program manager. He used to work at the European Commission.
DIPLOMACY
— The Council’s Simon Mordue will become deputy secretary-general of the European External Action Service on July 1.
— Eeva Scheele has started a new position at Finland’s ministry for foreign affairs heading communications and press relations for Finland’s 2025 chairmanship of the OSCE. She was previously a spokesperson at its permanent representation in Brussels.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
— Rebecca Wood has joined Penta as managing director in the financial services team in the Brussels office. She was previously with Brunswick Group.
— Chris Giapitzis Papandreou has joined Global Counsel as a senior associate in financial services, from DeHavilland.
HEALTH CARE
— Valerie Jentzch joins Global Counsel as a senior associate in health and life sciences, from Acumen Public Affairs.
SUSTAINABILITY
— Daniel Laaber joined BCW as senior account director on the Sustainability team. He was previously with EU Focus Group.
THANKS TO: Mari Eccles, Elisa Braun, Alexandre Léchenet, Gabriel Gavin and especially Ketrin Jochecová; visual producer Lucia Mackenzie, web producer Natalia Delgado and my editor Paul Dallison.
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