Views: 0
All future European Commissioners are representing the highest spheres of political and corporate elites in the member states. The EU’s co-legislators in the Parliament will review and debate the prospective commissioners (the president, von der Leyen, is not included in the screening process) and see that they fit to perform their job in “total independence”. However, the “screening process” will not be open to public and the declarations will be kept confidential during the whole debating process.
Background
The hearing process will start in November with the Parliament’s legal affairs committee going through the Commission nominees’ “declarations of interest”. The main purpose of detailing Commissioner’s assets is to show if a politician has accrued wealth from sources outside of their salary during their mandate; it is also meant to ensure good EU institutional governance by avoiding suspicion from the public that a decision has not been made for the general interest.
The EU treaties state that the members of the Commission “shall refrain from any action incompatible with their duties” and therefore abstain from any other professional activities during their mandate. To ensure that, the declaration of interest is supposed to include many details to ensure that a commissioner is excluded from working on certain issues if there’s a conflict. In practice, no commissioner filled in all the boxes in their declaration.
The European Parliament’s legal affairs committee, known as JURI, is going through the declarations of interest of all top EU officials to find answers to complicated questions.
Negotiations in the EP are not held in public and the declarations are kept secret during the whole process. The JURI’s members are supposed to objectively scrutinize the commissioners’ declarations in order to find conflicts of interest and not ready to play a EU-wide “socio-economic and political games. There are some examples as the JURI can topple commissioner(s), as happened with Romania’s Rovana Plumb and Hungary’s László Trócsányi.
The European Parliament, EP will start grilling Commission nominees on November 4 and proceed for about a week: the hearings for candidate will last about three hours; the Politico noticed that it “would be quite dramatic”, said Max Griera in the EU Transition Playbook (2024.10.04).
More in: https://www.politico.eu/article/leaked-eu-commissioner-property-money-influence-declaration-interest/
Examples
Information for the candidates, according the Politico’s accounts made by E. Braun, M. Griera and P. Dallison (October 3, 2024), being so far available follow below; we took some most notorious examples.
= Greece’s A. Tzitzikostas has the most impressive list of properties, with four pages of his declaration detailing his partial or total ownership of 16 apartments, 655,463 m2 of land, six stores, and also several garages and storage spaces all around Greece. The Tzitzikostas is one of the biggest landowners in the country, with land ownership dating back centuries, according to a Greek official; the family is one of the richest in northern Greece. Tzitzikostas’ portfolio includes the tourism industry, raising questions about decisions he might take that could affect the value of his properties. The future Commissioner also declares owning more than €200,000 of shares in various businesses (from dairy products to photovoltaic energy); he also received funding from Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy for one of his farms worth about €18 thousand.
= Italian R. Fitto declared owning seven apartments, while having shares in three others; his real estate assets, all located in Italy, also include land, two garages and a cellar. The politician has made his career in the public sector, is expected to take on the cohesion and reform portfolio. He also declares owning 15 percent of a pharmacy in Brindisi in the south of Italy, the value of which is estimated by Fitto himself at €150, 000.
= Bulgarian Commission nominee Ekaterina Zaharieva has also apparently established a real estate fortune. In 2008, she bought a 6,850 m2 plot of land including a holiday home on the Greek peninsula of Halkidiki, as well as an apartment in the country’s capital Sofia. Between 2016 and 2018, Zaharieva bought two other houses and plots of land in Bulgaria.
= Estonia’s Kaja Kallas, as the HRVP’s designate, only declares having bank accounts and savings. The section relating to the financial interests of spouses or partners was left empty, despite a 2023 controversy around her husband’s ownership of shares in a business with ties to Russia. However, she later details his positions in four legal entities: Tristock, Tallinn Directors Club, AS Framm and Novaria Consult.
= Portugal’s Maria Luis Albuquerque during her career “effortlessly jumped back and forth between the private sector and key governmental positions”, noted Politico. The candidate makes no secret about it in her declaration, providing lawmakers with a general description of her previous involvement with companies. However, she omitted any further details of the ownership structure or the revenues of her own consultancy, Roundatmosphere, owned together with her husband, the business made $170,000 in 2023 and $132,000 in 2022, according to financial data provided by Informa.
= Some designate commissioners may also have fortunes, but many of them have not shared details on their assets: i.e. current commissioner V. Dombrovskis filed almost an empty form. He said: “My declarations of interest have been public for 10 years now and are completed fully in line with applicable rules … For already 10 years I have been serving as a Member of the European Commission, correspondingly there are not many past activities left to declare.”
Source: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-conflict-greens-background-meps-legal/
High-profiled future Commissioners
= Other designate Commissioners are being “well-connected” both in their countries and in EU: e.g. Luxembourg’s Ch. Hansen, the prospective commissioner for agriculture, has high-profile ties. His wife works as an assistant in the Cabinet of EP’s President Roberta Metsola, and his cousin is Luxembourg’s minister for agriculture (however, commissioners are only required to disclose details involving spouses and children). Hansen has been the president of a small animal breeding association (Union des Sociétés Avicoles du Grand-Duché du Luxembourg) since 2015; though he vowed to resign if appointed.
= Spain’s Teresa Ribera, executive vice president for a clean, just and competitive transition, is well-connected in international climate circles. Before and during her tenure as Spain’s minister for energy and environment, she worked with over 10 international NGOs, think tanks, and agencies dealing with climate and the environment.
= Lithuania’s A. Kubilius, commissioner for defense and space, co-founded in 2019 the “Friends of European Russia Forum,” which supports opposition and civil society in Russia. He also is a member of an association that comes across as highly critical of China. Kubilius was also a member of the international board of advisers of the International Republican Institute, IRI from 2016 to 2019; the IRI is a nonprofit group that receives US federal funds to help countries develop the mechanisms of democracy.
= Slovenian’s candidate, Marta Kos was working for Brussels lobbying firm Kreab as a senior adviser and also owned her own boutique consultancy registered in Switzerland. While she did not consider herself a lobbyist, Kos lists European football’s governing body UEFA as one of her clients for “advocacy” missions in 2021 at the UN level “and its most relevant bodies”; besides, she did not voluntarily declare that her husband is Switzerland’s “Mr. Europe” Henri Getaz, former secretary-general of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).
Note. Poland’s P. Serafin, Hungary’s Olivér Várhelyi and the Netherlands’ W. Hoekstra were found to have so far no conflicts of interest by the EP’s legal affairs committee, JURI.
Source: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-conflict-greens-background-meps-legal/