Brussels, 18/07/2011 (Agence Europe) - European Commission rules for dealing with possible conflicts of interest involving the tasks of special advisers and their outside activities have to be improved. That is the substance of the opinion delivered by European Ombudsman Nikiforos Diamandouros on Monday 18 July. He made some suggestions as to how this improvement might be achieved.
From 2007 to 2010, former president of the European Parliament Pat Cox acted as an unpaid special adviser to Meglena Kuneva, who was at the time the European commissioner for health and consumer policy. In February 2010, the NGO Corporate Europe Observatory turned to the ombudsman, alleging that the Commission had failed adequately to address the issue of a possible conflict of interest between the special adviser's tasks and his remunerated activities for multinational companies, as well as lobbying firms. The Commission stated that there had been no conflict of interest, since Cox advised Kuneva in the field of political communication on consumer issues and not on policy definition.
After his investigation of the case, the ombudsman concluded that it was impossible for him adequately to examine the issue of a possible conflict of interest in this case as the Commission “failed to adhere to the procedural obligations required by its own rules on special advisers, as regards the appointment of Mr Cox in 2007 and 2009”. The ombudsman, then, called on the Commission to improve its rules for handling possible conflicts of interest involving the tasks of special advisers and their outside activities.
The full text of the ombudsman's decision is available at:
http://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/cases/decision.faces/en/10719/html.bookmark