Emily O’Reilly: Revolving door between EU and lobbying firms is ‘soft corruption’

The revolving door of EU officials moving to take up very well-paid jobs as lobbyists afterwards could be seen as a form of “soft corruption”, the European Union’s ombudsman has said.

Emily O’Reilly said there should be stronger rules to “forbid” some officials from taking up certain jobs after leaving their positions. There were “parallels” between blatant corruption scandals where foreign powers had sought to buy influence in the European Parliament, and a consultancy firm poaching a former official for “intel” after they had left their position in the EU, she said.

In an interview with The Irish Times, Ms O’Reilly said if people knew the amounts former officials in charge of regulation were being paid to join lobbying firms, they might ask what the companies were “getting in return”.

The European Parliament has been rocked by a number of scandals in recent years, such as “Qatargate”, which centres on allegations that Qatar and Morocco bought influence in the parliament. The controversy erupted after a series of raids in late 2022 in which Belgian prosecutors seized €1.5 million in cash, which included hundreds of thousands of euro stuffed into a suitcase.

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“Qatargate was a global story because people saw the actual bags of cash; it was comic, we can see this is corruption,” Ms O’Reilly said. “You get Qatargate, people being paid allegedly to get intel on the workings of lawmakers. A consultancy [firm] pays someone from inside [to come work for them], essentially to give them intel, I mean there are parallels.”

High-profile cases of former EU commissioners being hired for advisory roles were often “window dressing” for large companies, Ms O’Reilly said. “I don’t think they’re expected to do that much,” she said.

The real wins for lobbying and consultancy firms were when they secured the services of former European Commission officials who had been working in the “innards” of policy formation or regulatory enforcement, she said. “The people you really need to get are the people who do the work, mid-level heads of unit, who know more about the files than anybody else on God’s earth,” she said. “Getting enforcement officials is a huge deal for them because that’s where you’re going to get the info.”

[ Qatargate causes upheaval and suspicion in European Parliament ]

There was a lack of awareness in the commission that this “could be a form of soft corruption”, Ms O’Reilly said. She recalled an anecdote one senior EU figure told her about a big law firm throwing a cocktail party to celebrate hiring a particular official.

Ms O’Reilly said her office had previously reviewed 100 files of commission officials who had left their jobs, many to move into the private sector. “We found there was a huge reluctance to stop them from going,” she said. While former officials could be restricted from lobbying on laws or areas they had previously worked on for a period, in practice they could advise their new colleagues “who to lobby”, she said.

In response, the commission said senior staff were restricted from lobbying on areas they had worked on over the previous three years for a 12-month “cooling off” period after leaving.

The commission had to strike “an appropriate balance” between restrictions put on former staff and the need to respect their right to work, a spokeswoman said. “Each move to the private sector is carefully examined by the commission,” she said. Requests from former staff to take up certain roles were examined to safeguard the institution’s interests, she added. “The commission can also refuse such requests.”

The fact that MEPs were allowed to have side jobs was another area that had not been tackled in recent efforts to impose higher standards in the parliament, Ms O’Reilly said. “You could be working as a lawyer, you could be working as a consultant. To me, maybe from our culture instinctively, that just doesn’t sit right. Who are you really working for?”

From her fifth-floor office in the French city of Strasbourg, O’Reilly, who is originally from Tullamore, Co Offaly, has been a thorn in the side of the EU institutions. Previously a journalist and editor, in 2003 she was appointed to head the office of the Ombudsman in Ireland. Then in 2013 she was elected to the EU watchdog role, securing a second five-year term in 2019.

Her re-election by the parliament had been tough going, she said, due to opposition from the European People’s Party, the large centre-right grouping. “They’ve never tended to like ombudspeople anyway but they took a particular dislike to me.”

Now in the final year of her second stint, she is regarded by many observers as having been an ombudsman with teeth, who was not afraid to put the boot into the commission and others. “We’re a tiny office, we’re 80 people, there’s a lot of EU to be watching, but we’ve worked very efficiently,” she said.

One big point of tension has been the reluctance of the commission to release documents under the EU’s equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act. “Anything that has a slight whiff of political sensitivity about it, they push back, which is frustrating,” she said.

The cogs of the EU machine had moved impressively quickly in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she said. “It shows just how excellent the administration can be, they probably wouldn’t expect me to say that.”

[ Everyone knew the Adriana was doomed. No one helped ]

Her office recently investigated the Adriana disaster, in which more than 600 migrants drowned after the overcrowded ship they were on sank in the Mediterranean last June. The investigation into the role of Frontex, the agency in charge of EU border control, found legally it could not have intervened without clearance from the member state involved. “They attempted to get in touch with the Greek coast guard and the coast guard did not pick up the phone,” she said.

EU migration policy had shifted to the point where there was now no proactive, maritime search-and-rescue operation in place. This effectively told migrants or asylum seekers that “if you chose to attempt to cross the Mediterranean you’re on your own”. Europe’s response to the Adriana tragedy had been little more than “a shoulder shrug”, Ms O’Reilly said. “It’s like migrants live in a different realm.”

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