EU-DIGEST

Last year, the European Parliament adopted rules requiring MEPs who chair committees to publish their meetings with registered lobbyists.

But earlier this week, the NGO Transparency International revealed six out of the 22 chairs have so far failed to do so since July 2019.

Read more at: 
EU parliament chairs explain missing lobbyist meetings

In a Communication it is pressing tech platforms to produce monthly reports about their efforts in this area, asking for more detailed data on actions being taken to promote authoritative content; improve users’ awareness; and limit coronavirus disinformation and advertising related to it. 

It also wants to see increased cooperation from platforms towards researchers, and fact-checkers in all EU Members States (for all languages), along with increased transparency around the implementation of policies to inform users in instances where they interact with disinformation. 

In recent years the Commission has pressed platforms for action to tackle misinformation — signing up tech giants and adtech players to a voluntary Code of Practice on disinformation focused on disrupting ad revenues and empowering reporting of fakes.

Since then, its assessment of platforms’ efforts to tackle malicious fakes has been lukewarm to say the least, with repeat calls for them to do more. It has also repeatedly called out a problematic ongoing lack of transparency related to these self regulatory efforts.

The coronavirus crisis has further amped up political pressure on platforms over their handling of online disinformation — and tech giants such as Google have responded with some measures aimed at pro-actively surfacing authoritative health information alongside coronavirus content (initially focused on the US, in its case).

Back in April, Facebook also said it would alert users who have interacted with certain types of coronavirus misinformation — displaying a debunking pop-up with messaging from the World Health Organization.

However the Commission said today that it wants to see more evidence that such measures are working.

EU lawmakers are also in the process of drafting new rules for digital services and platforms that could redrawn the line of liability and heap new responsibilities on tech businesses related to the content they host. A draft of this incoming Digital Services Act (DSA) is slated by the end of the year, after a public consultation kicked off last week.

Read more at: Tech giants must open up about the coronavirus ‘infodemic’, say EU lawmakers | TechCrunch

 In a public address on Monday night, the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, stated, “Turkey is a country where production must continue and the cogs must keep turning under every circumstance and every condition.” Turkey, where more than two hundred people have died from the new coronavirus, has one of the world’s fastest-growing outbreaks, but Erdoğan has resisted urgent action, calling only for a “voluntary quarantine” for most of the country. Opposition politicians have called for harsher measures against the coronavirus, including the types of lockdowns that have gone into effect around the world, but they have been increasingly besieged and marginalized in recent years, as Erdoğan has extended his power and thrown his rivals in prison. Last week, Turkey arrested hundreds of people for “provocative” posts about the outbreak on social media. Medical professionals who have urged harsher measures have issued apologies after being arrested.

I recently spoke by phone with Emrah Altindis, a professor of biology at Boston College who has been studying the epidemic in Turkey, where he is from. He is also one of the editors of the book “Authoritarianism and Resistance in Turkey: Conversations on Democratic and Social Challenges.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Erdoğan’s privatization of the medical system affected coronavirus preparation, how the Syrian refugee crisis has changed Turkish society, and the dangers of an outbreak in Turkey’s prisons.

Let’s start with the numbers. The first case in Turkey was detected on March 11th. This was later than in most countries. And the first death happened on March 17th. And as of today, March 31st, we have lost two hundred and fourteen people. And the number of cases that are confirmed is 13,531. If you compare these numbers to other countries’ after they had a hundred cases detected, Turkey has the biggest rate of increase in the number of cases in the world right now. So it means that it is really very serious.

We have some hope with the mortality rate. As you know, it is very high in Spain and in Italy. But in Turkey, if these official numbers are true—and they are extremely questionable, because there is no transparency in Turkey—but, if these numbers are true, then the rate is less than in Italy or Spain.

Read more: The Coronavirus Meets Authoritarianism in Turkey | The New Yorker

Ordinary EU citizens should get a say in Brussels lawmaking and hold officials to account via the European Parliament's petitions committee (PETI) in the next five years, according to its chairman, Spanish centre-right MEP Dolors Montserrat. The "open door" to Brussels should also create "proximity" between people and EU officials in troubled times, she said. 

Read more at: An 'open door' for EU citizens

The Dutch healthcare institute "Zorginstituut Nederland" said recently insurers should stop paying for expensive drugs if pharmaceutical companies continue to refuse to say how they arrive at their pricing. 

The institute, which assesses the efficacy of new drugs and advises the government on whether they should be included in the basic healthcare policy, says the drugs companies are effectively blackmailing officials by refusing to be transparent about their prices.

Last years June announcement that Ireland is joining the Beneluxa Initiative on Pharmaceutical Policy might suggest renewed vigour for the drive to equip national governments with more clout in their pricing negotiations with international drug firms.

 The Bruges-based College of Europe is setting up private meetings with the EU institutions for seven ambassadors plus seven high-level officials from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The Bruges-based institute counts politicians, former prime ministers, and top-ranking EU officials as alumni and boasts of its wide network as an appeal to future students.

A leaked email to an MEP from the institute, seen by EUobserver, says they "are organising a visit to the European institutions for seven Saudi ambassadors and seven high-level officials from the Saudi government".

The visit is set for 18 to 22 February and will include meeting College of Europe graduates who now work at the EU institutions.

The College of Europe says some of the MEPs that they reached out to have accepted their offer, thus allowing the Saudi ambassadors to Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania to enter the European Parliament on 19 February.

Although EU lobby transparency rules says academic institutions should register if they "deal with EU activities and policies and are in touch with the EU institutions", the College of Europe is not listed in the EU joint-transparency register.

Exceptions may apply if such visits by educational institutes are for a purely academic exercise. But the leaked email makes no mention that the visit is academic.

Instead, it says the proposed meetings would enable the Saudis and the MEPs "to discuss current issues in the relations between the EU and the Saudi government."

Green MEPs have now demanded accountability.

Note EU-Digest: Saudi government officials should not be welcome based on the murder they orchestrated on Jamal Khashoggi and their human rights record.

 Read more: Saudis paying College of Europe to lobby MEPs

In the Netherlands it’s still possible to create legal companies without revealing the identity of the actual owner, Criminals abuse such constructions for purposes of corruption, fraud, money laundering, organised crime and cartels. A public registry, the so-called UBO registry, aims to change all that. But it can only happen if the registry is accessible to all.

A UBO registry is a central registry which contains the names of the ultimate beneficiaries and other legal corporate entities. A ‘UBO’ or Ultimate Beneficial Owner, is the person who is pulling the strings, openly or behind the scenes. Openness about the identity of the UBO strengthens confidence, increases accountability and gives the market, stakeholders, investors, businesses and consumers a proper insight into who exactly they are dealing with. Corruption, money laundering and the financing of terrorism are international problems and that is why, before June 26 2017, all EU countries have to have a registry in place.

Recently, finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem presented an outline of the Dutch version of the UBO registry. Although Dijsselbloem is an advocate of a registry, his version is far from offering real transparency. Not only does the government want to erect a paywall, it also wants to know who wants the information: every visitor needs to log in. Moreover, the general public’s access to the registry is limited to a minimal data set.

Shadowy constructions The data from a UBO registry are only properly useful if access is unlimited and equal for all. Obscuring information about companies, foundations, associations and organisations is part of the problem.

The minister’s obstructions are also flying in the face of what the registry is meant to achieve; i.e. putting a stop to the creation of shadowy constructions used for illegal purposes. In order to do that, the complete data set needs to be accessible. In Myanmar, for instance, a criminal chain made up of military elites, drug barons and money laundering organisations related to the jade industry was discovered. This was only possible because the complete data set was publicly accessible, machine readable and programmatically compatible. Public watch dogs, among them Global Witness, were thus able to reveal the hidden ties between the jade industry and the most important players.

A pay-per-view system is problematic because it impedes the use of the complete data. If you have a list of administrators who have been convicted for money laundering and you want to combine it with the Dutch UBO registry to check if any of the people appearing on the list is on the board if a Dutch company, the costs of your research will mount considerably. The finance minister is silent on the subject of open data in its UBO registry proposal. He is hiding behind the privacy argument, which is a questionable one since it is at odds with transparency. The minister does admit that a strict access limitation would be difficult to achieve and monitor and would be expensive – both for the administrators and the users of the registry – and not in line with the purposes of the Directive.

Read more: Dutch should go for real transparency in corporate ownership - DutchNews.nl

We now know that the TTIP negotiations entered a decisive phase on October 15, 2015. That’s when US and EU representatives laid their cards on the table, exchanging offers to cut taxes on imports from each other. Up until then, the US had only broached hypothetical reductions; now they were openly offering to remove 87.5 percent of tariffs completely.

That was more than the EU expected. European negotiators had to agree a better offer, or risk derailing the deal. A week later, they did came up with a new proposal: reductions in 97 percent of tariff categories.

The EU’s secret offer, which CORRECTIV has seen in its entirety, is made up of 181 pages of densely-printed text and can be found here. It’s got almost 8,000 categories: Every species of fish, every chemical has its own tariff category. Importing a parka? Wool, or polyester?

Trade deals are like poker games. Europe’s big offer comes with a big hope: That the US will open up its public bidding process to European firms. That way, European construction companies could bid on contracts to build US highways, or BMW could sell cop cars to American sheriffs.

For the first time, the tariff offer makes clear what TTIP might do for consumers: remove duties, and prices tend to drop. With tariffs on parts gone, cars could get cheaper. Per part, tariffs add just a few cents on the euro, but altogether European car manufacturers could save a billion Euros each year, according to German Association of the Automotive Industry calculations. Manufacturers could then pass the savings on to consumers.

The EU is now waiting for the US to offer a substantial deal on public procurement. In a September 15 report obtained by CORRECTIV, the European Commission says “it definitely expects that the US will offer to open public procurement at a future point in time, in exchange for the revised tariff offer.”

That report also indicated that the US “promised to make a proposal regarding public procurement for the first time” when the EU and US put forth their symmetrical tariff reductions, eliminating 97 percent of all tariffs.
Public bids are a major TTIP sticking point. The EU wants the US to finally open its markets to allow firms like Balfour Beattie or BMW to compete when cities put out a call for bids on a new building or fleet of cars. The US is less than eager, because that would subject domestic companies – which are already allowed to bid on projects in the EU – to increased competition.

Four days before the next negotiation round starts, the European Commission has now indicated that they don’t expect a comprehensive offer. Sources said that the US haven’t sent their proposal yet and that public procurement will be discussed right after the official negotiation round. The 12th round of negotiations started this Monday in Brussels.

Read more: TTIP: Secret document reveals EU offer to drop 97 percent of tariffs | openDemocracy

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) should be a “mixed” agreement and, therefore, be ratified by national institutions, according to Greece’s economy minister. EurActiv Greece reports.

Speaking at a conference on Wednesday (13 January) co-organized by VouliWatch and The Press Project, Greek Minister of Economy, Infrastructure, Shipping and Tourism, Giorgos Stathakis, explained his government's position on TTIP.

Before being in government in January 2015, the leftist Syriza party had been suspicious of TTIP.

Georgios Katrougkalos, the then-deputy minister for administrative reform, had told EurActiv Greece that “Athens will use its veto to kill the proposed trade pact.”

But in August 2015, the Syriza party was split, as far-left rebels who opposed Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s bailout deal with Europe decided to form a new movement.

Since then, the Syriza-led government has adopted a more moderate tone on the TTIP agreement.

Stathakis noted that at the beginning, the trade agreement “was unimaginable, not transparent and inaccessible”.

He added that there was also the “shock” idea, according to which the deal should be sealed in record time “before any discussion took place”.

But the framework of TTIP negotiations has changed.  He said that now, the negotiations are more accessible.
“The right of states to legislate and to change the law for the protection of public health, safety or the environment, and consumer protection, is ensured,” Stathakis underlined.

The Greek minister also stressed that the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism (ISDS), which has triggered strong reactions across Europe, was replaced by a normal court of international authority, with “permanent features and function codes”.

Read more: Athens says TTIP should be ratified by national parliaments | EurActiv

Governments want your data now more than ever.

That's according to Twitter, which released its twice-yearly transparency report on Tuesday, revealing that the number of times governments requested user account information jumped about 52% from 2,871 requests during the second half of 2014 to 4,363 requests during the first half of this year. The social network cooperated with 58% of those requests by handing over data.

Jeremy Kessel, Twitter's senior manager of global legal policy, called it, the "largest increase between reporting periods" the social network has ever seen.

Just as notable: Periscope alone received 1,391 copyright takedown requests during the same period — a startling number given the popular live streaming app debuted in March.

Meanwhile, requests from U.S. government officials made up 56% of all requests, followed by Japan, then Turkey, although requests from India spiked a whopping 175% versus the period before to 113 requests, 19% of which produced some information.

Twitter's government transparency report, which the social network began publishing in 2012, covers data requests from the governments of more than 45 countries, from Canada and the Dominican Republic to Cyprus and Serbia, often relating to criminal investigations.

Read more: Twitter says government requests for your data jumped 52%

The former head of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy, said Thursday that improved consumer protection was at the heart of the controversial US-European Union free-trade pact under negotiation.

Lamy insisted that 80 percent of the negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership deal with harmonization of consumer protection standards, while only 20 percent focus on such typical trade issues as tariffs and market access.

He said that political leaders` failure to explain that to the public had created a vacuum that allowed anti-TTIP movements to grow, he told the Worldwide Symposium of the Foreign Trade Advisors of France in Miami.

Political leaders "up to now have not been handling it well," Lamy said. "Everyone in Europe thinks they`re going to be forced to eat chlorine-rinsed chicken, or in the United States, cheese rotting with bacteria."

read more: Consumer protection at heart of US-EU trade plan: Lamy | Zee News

TTIP

With just a few days left before the British Parliament dissolves ahead of the general election, a flurry of select committees are publishing reports on inquiries which have been held in recent months. Among them is the Business Innovation and Skills Select Committee’s report on the Transatlantic Trade and investment Partnership (TTIP), published yesterday.

I gave evidence to the TTIP inquiry on behalf of Global Justice Now.

TTIP is an ambitious neoliberal trade agreement being negotiated between the EU and USA. Its purpose is to create new trading opportunities for EU and US business by reducing tariffs, removing unnecessary regulation, liberalising some sectors and giving new protection for investors.

The controversy around TTIP is about what regulation is deemed unnecessary, which sectors will be liberalised and that business will benefit at the expense of governments.

The gravity of these concerns has ignited a furious public campaign on TTIP from trade unions, environmental organisations, international development groups and NHS campaigners, united in their call for the negotiations to stop.

The findings of the BIS select committee report vindicate the public’s concerns.

Many of the arguments for TTIP rest on the benefits it will bring to the UK, European and US economy, often breaking this down to a £400 benefit to every UK family every year. The economic models used to churn out these figures are fundamentally flawed (http://blog.policy.manchester.ac.uk/featured/2013/12/the-false-promise-of-eu-us-trade-talks/) and present a best case scenario which would not deliver any benefits until 2027 and then only £2 per person a week - equivalent to a packet of fishfingers.

The 11 British MPs from across the political spectrum find that “it is impossible at this stage to quantify those benefits in any meaningful way”. They are critical of the figures the UK government uses to promote TTIP and instruct it to undertake a comprehensive assessment of the likely economic benefits of various possible outcomes on TTIP.

Read more: New parliamentary report on TTIP highlights its dangers | openDemocracy

Read more: No EU-US trade deal by 2015, says TTIP expert | EurActiv

Civil servants in the UK could be fired if they speak with journalists without first asking for permission from a government minister, the Telegraph reports.

The new measure is contained in the Civil Service Code, which regulates the jobs of about 400,000 public employees across the country. The Code was updated with the new language on March 16.
According to The Telegraph's Ben Riley-Smith, the measure "effectively bans any communication with journalists unless a senior member of the government has given explicit approval."

A source in the Cabinet Office said that the move was an attempt to increase ministerial accountability of civil servants in their department, the Telegraph reports.

The move raises some doubts about the government's commitment to transparency. The Civil Service is a public body created to support the government, but they are politically neutral employees.
Read more: Civil servants to seek ministerial allowance to speak with media - Business Insider

Check out the Spring 2015 edition of Sure!   

Sure! is a compilation of press reports as well as market research conducted by Koster Verzekeringen BV, in order to gain more insight into the developments concerning the insurance industry as it relates to the overall global economic climate, social structure and the political environment.

In the Spring 2015 edition of Sure! Solvency II remains on top, as more and more effects of it's impact are felt around the European Union, radically changing the way insurance companies used to conduct their business. The objective of Solvency II, as aspired by the European Commission, is to create additional transparency and a more harmonized insurance industry throughout the European Union.

The Spring 2015 edition of Sure! also provides insight on how some specific EU member states are being affected by Solvency II , including France, Germany, Italy, Britain, in addition to recent developments in Greece and the Netherlands related to the insurance industry.  

EU-Digest

Transparency key to success Atlantic Alliance

When listening to or reading US financial reports there are some remarkably disturbing facts popping up.

One of these is the fact that it was actually the US which caused the 2007/2008 financial crash but this has been completely swept under the mat by the US.

Keep in mind though that all the media outlets in the US, except very few, which are "not for profit organizations" (who mainly get their income from public/private donations and grants) are mostly profit based multi-national corporations. This should immediately raise a red flag as to the impartiality and balance of the news/financial reports they release.

Possibly, this is also the reason that at the same time there is this constant barrage of attacks coming from those same US media circles bashing and critizicing the EU/ECB for not adopting the US QE financial policies (printing more money and pumping this" monopoly money" into the marketplace) in order to get the EU economy going again.

As to the US QE policies,  many economists believe this could eventually be a recipe for future US economic disaster.

Also, looking at some of the official figures put out by the US Government and reading between the lines, the attentive reader will quickly find a lot of nebulous statistics on a variety of issues and items, including employment, trade, debt, infrastructure, military and security expenditures.

In this volatile scenario Wall Street is a special "Chapter" by itself.  Some critics call Wall Street a financial "fairyland" where words and phrases as versatility, headwinds, optimize, boldness, performance, choices, transparency, bubbles, wealth, growth, state of the art, profitable, opportunity are used in different ways as shares go up and down and traders turn out the big winners in dividing up the spoils.

Obviously without any doubt there are also "forces" in Europe ( Britain) who are following and would love to have the EU adapt this "flawed" US financial model.

Fortunately, and maybe unfortunately for some,  the EU is a Union of 28 countries with 28 central banks.  Of these 28 countries 18 belong to the so called European Economic Zone (Eurozone) that have adopted the euro (€) as their common currency.and sole legal tender.

The ECB is the central bank for the euro and administers monetary policy for the whole Eurozone.

Any report or statistic on or about the state of the EU economy issued by the ECB  is scrutinized very carefully by all 18 members of the ECB before they become public.Canada which is a Federated country also applies similar rules.

Official EU financial reports and statement are therefore without any doubt far  more accurate and reliable than those coming from US government agencies.

Isn't it time for the EU to get to the point with our friends across the other side of the pond on this issue? And what better venue to do it than during the ongoing EU-US trade negotiations?

EU-Digest

The operations of the 124 largest publicly traded companies are opaque, with relatively few fully revealing their corporate holdings, financial information or anti-corruption efforts, according to a new report from Transparency International.

"Acts of corruption are very often aided by the use of opaque company structures and secrecy jurisdictions," the report said. "Comprehensive public reporting is a key component of the measures companies must take to address corruption and provide the transparency that is the basis for robust and accountable governance."

Transparency International studied three categories: reporting on anticorruption programs, organizational transparency and country-by-country reporting.

Just one company, Vodafone, managed to score at least 50 percent across all three categories, the report said.

Only three of the 124 companies studied don't commit to complying with anti-corruptions laws, but 68 don't disclose their political contributions and only 56 forbid "facilitation payments," or small bribes, the report said.
Read more: Do you know what your company is doing?

Google’s efforts to carry out a European court order on the “right to be forgotten” took another twist on Friday as the company restored search-engine links to several newspaper articles from The Guardian whose delinking had stirred a public furor only a day earlier.

The court’s ruling “only applies to people’s names in search results,” he said, adding, “The new rules apply to more than just search engines.

Read more: Google Reinstates European Links to Articles From The Guardian - NYTimes.com

Germany's biggest telecoms company is to follow Vodafone in disclosing for the first time the number of surveillance requests it receives from governments around the world.

Deutsche Telekom, which owns half of Britain's EE mobile network and operates in 14 countries including the US, Spain and Poland, has already published surveillance data for its home nation – one of the countries that have reacted most angrily to the Edward Snowden revelations. In the wake of Vodafone's disclosures, first published in the Guardian on Friday, it announced that it would extend its disclosures to every other market where it operates and where it is legal.

A spokeswoman for Deutsche Telekom, which has 140 million customers worldwide, said: "Deutsche Telekom has initially focused on Germany when it comes to disclosure of government requests.

We are currently checking if and to what extent our national companies can disclose information. We intend to publish something similar to Vodafone."

Bosses of the world's biggest mobile networks, many of which have headquarters in Europe, are gathering for an industry conference in Shanghai this weekend, and the debate is expected to centre on whether they should join Deutsche and Vodafone in using transparency to push back against the use of their technology for government surveillance.

Mobile companies, unlike social networks, cannot operate without a government-issued licence, and have previously been reluctant to discuss the extent of their cooperation with national security and law enforcement agencies.

But Vodafone broke cover on Friday by confirming that in around half a dozen of the markets in which it operates, governments in Europe and outside have installed their own secret listening equipment on its network and those of other operators.

Under this direct access system, wires suck up traffic at key points in the network, allowing unfettered access to the content of phone conversations and text messages, and in some cases delivering

Read more: Deutsche Telekom to follow Vodafone in revealing surveillance | World news | The Guardian