Stern says allowing close relations between business and government was a German idea. Now the EU is having to deal with the same problem in Brussels (in German).

All About Alpha says the European Parliament is getting advice biased against hedge funds.

Graft is a tax on the poor, says Transparency International. Indeed, and it’s a tax on the middle-class and the rich too.

Emerging Privacy Issues Between the US and the EU: Bridging the Transatlantic Gap

The EU and the US are engaged in a race to the bottom as regards privacy and data retention. At issue are the Passenger Name Record (PNR), commercial use of personal data, and lack of privacy policies in both blocs.

Various MEPs discussed the issue with US lawyers in Georgetown today. There’s a webcast available of the whole discussion at http://www.law.georgetown.edu/webcast/eventDetail.cfm?eventID=557

It’s pretty interesting, though the moderator should have squashed Sophia in’t Veld when she started her 5 minute anti-american rant. Here’s the programme:

MODERATOR: Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Adjunct Professor, Georgetown University Law Center

PANELISTS: Sophia in’t Veld, Member of European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (Netherlands)

Baroness Sarah Ludford, Member of European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (United Kingdom)

Alexander Alvaro, Member of European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (Germany)

Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, Member of European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (Netherlands)

Ignasi Guardans Cambo, Member of European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (Spain)

Adam Levitin, Professor, Georgetown University Law Center
 
NOTE: The United States and the European Union are confronting many common privacy challenges -  promoting trust and confidence for Internet commerce, developing safeguards for behavioral targeting and search histories, security breach notification and identity theft. There are also areas - identification requirements, border control and passenger record transfers - where national security requirements
appear to conflict with privacy laws. The panelists will discuss current efforts to address these challenges.

They’re available on the Statewatch front page.

Why Statewatch can’t sort out its website to be more user friendly escapes me. Everything goes into PDF format with no indication of file size. News items aren’t dated. They dump a whole year’s news items into one massive long page so it’s impossible to link to any one item. And there aren’t any pictures, dammit!

Sort it out, Statewatch!

If, like me, you used to hide under the bedclothes with a radio as a youngster and listen to Soviet broadcasts describing fantastic achievements in agriculture and industry, you’ll appreciate this post on the Agriculture Commissioner’s official blog.

It’s Mariann Fischer Boel commenting on a Eurobarometer survey of public attitudes to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). With a self-congratulatory headline of “CAP performing well, says silent majority“, she proceeds to celebrate that ordinary people think highly of CAP reform, that 58% think the budget should stay the same or rise, and that a clear majority think it’s a good idea to pay farmers directly instead of subsidising their products (ultimately, of course, there’s no difference to the taxpayer).

Now, the bad news

Unfortunately, this rosy picture is totally undermined when you actually look at the survey results.

Firstly, a clear majority of those surveyed (53%) have never even heard of the CAP. 4% didn’t know if they’ve heard of it or not. This really means that the surveyors should have stopped. They should have moved on to someone with at least a knowledge of what the CAP is, such as the 34% who’d heard of it but didn’t really know what it is (and that’s being charitable).

But no, they ploughed on. Having explained that EU money had been decoupled from production and was now being paid direct to farmers, respondents were asked if they thought that was a good or bad thing. 12% said they didn’t know. 52% said it was a good thing, even though some of them must still have been taking the existence of the CAP on board for the first time.

Getting the answer you want to hear

Moving on, we come to a real car-crash of an analysis, and a classic case of getting the answer you want. Asked whether the current agricultural budget is too high, too low, or just about right, 43% say it’s just about right - down by 2 points since last year. The authors give this finding a bold headline “A large section of opinion believes the current budget to be at the correct level“, then interpret it as “A relative majority (43%, -2 points since 2006) consider that the current proportion of the budget devoted to agriculture is ‘about right’”.

Finally, it’s worth noting how the survey prepares the ground for further regulation on food products and provides justification for the EU’s current communication strategy, which will see Brussels using TV and radio to pump out propaganda to the pliant population.

Nice alliteration.

The EU should give us more information, say the citizens!

Having earlier humiliated the respondents about their ignorance of the CAP and primed them to desire more information, a series of questions asks “would you like to be more informed about…agriculture… the CAP… how would you like to be informed?”.

Naturally the answers are positive - people would certainly like to be more informed. The next question should have been “Would you like the EU to inform you, or an independent source?” That would have put a small cat among some minor pigeons. But it would be too much to hope for.

So all is good in Mariann Fischer-Boel’s world. The CAP is performing well. The people are happy and they are looking to the EU to provide them with the information they need. A crackly Russian accent reaches me over the medium waves, faint but just strong enough to understand that tractor production is up and the harvest this year will be tremendous.

Hat-tip to CAP Healthcheck.

The Commission has been getting worked up about organised crime in Bulgaria recently. The country makes Italy look like an upstanding citizen, says Transitions Online.

if his novels read more like today’s news than fiction, it’s because they often are. An Olympic wannabe-wrestler who claims to have himself engaged in skullduggery in the lawless days of post-communist Bulgaria, Stoev mixed real-life underworld and government corruption with fiction in his BG Godfather series. The details were so vivid that he became a victim. The 35-year-old writer was gunned down in broad daylight on a street in central Sofia and died while undergoing surgery to remove a bullet lodged in his brain.

The Economist is also interested in Bulgaria this week

Cyberlaw is a new expert blog, specialising in data protection, cybercrime, digital rights. Worth keeping an eye on.

The author of Cyberlaw might be interested to read that confidential state data is available on CDs in the markets of Kiev.

UK minister Margaret Hodge is accused of colluding with Vodafone to keep mobile phone charges high. The details will be on Channel 4 tomorrow. Of course it doesn’t matter much, because the real problem is a lack of competition. Telecoms providers enjoy “collective dominance”, a (disputed) concept in EU and competition law that is basically a feature of oligopolies.

The ECJ recently issued an interim judgment banning spring hunting in Malta. This video shows that English isn’t always the province of the elites, it’s also the international language of swearing.

Last week this blog put in a complaint to the European Ombudsman, stating that OLAF was not providing adequate information to the public about its work on two cases.

One of these cases is an investigation into the Centre for the Development of Enterprise (CDE), a development quango supporting projects in Africa. The former director (now expected to become prime minister of Mali) is alleged to have steered EU money into businesses in which he owned shares. The head of IT at the Centre, Terry Battersby, reported the conflict of interest in 2006 and in response the Commission partly blocked the EU’s contribution to the CDE’s budget.

By October 2007, Mr Battersby was presumably encountering problems in his work as a result of the claims. Labour MEP Brian Simpson tabled a question in Parliament to try to get the Commission to publicly clarify what was going on.

“What action are [the Commission] prepared to take in ensuring that any individual accused of maladministration is prosecuted, that the board which appears to have lost the confidence of our ACP partners is removed and that Mr Terry Battersby, the person who brought these alleged irregularities to light, is protected from harassment and retaliatory measures by CDE senior management?”

The Commission replied that it would “closely follow” procedures related to staff.

“The Commission, the Council Secretariat, the ACP Secretariat and the European Investment Bank (EIB) all have observer status at Board meetings. It is in the quality of observer at the meetings of the Executive Board, as well as via regular contacts with the Management and Staff Committee of the CDE that the Commission will closely follow that the procedures relating to staff are respected and has already received assurances from the Board that this will be the case.”

But whistleblowers rarely get an easy ride, and the Commission’s assurances appear to be smoke. The Times reports today that

A British whistleblower who exposed alleged corruption at a European aid agency faces the sack after he told EU fraud investigators that his boss was involved in the scam.

Terry Battersby, 53, from Manchester, has been removed from his job as head of information technology at the Brussels-based Centre for the Development of Enterprise (CDE) and placed on a short-term contract…

Brian Simpson, a Labour MEP, said Battersby had been the victim of a “witch-hunt” for having the courage to speak out. Battersby, who has worked at the CDE for 16 years, is now on a temporary six-month contract, after being denied a permanent job.

It’s well known that if you discover fraud in the EU and decide to blow the whistle, you run a serious risk of suffering for your efforts. On numerous occasions, the tables have been turned and the whistle-blower has become the subject of the investigation instead.

The EU has no adequate mechanism for protecting people who report fraud, and the Battersby case shows how much one is needed. MEPs shouldn’t have to be raising the matter in Parliament, the protection should already be in place and recognised.

UPDATE (28 April): Joy e-mails to say that the CDE isn’t an EU institution and that the Commission can’t control how it treats its staff. The money comes from the European Development Fund which is financed by the member states under the Cotonou Agreement. Hmm… I’m happy to change this post and stop accusing the Commission of involvement, but I’m pretty sure DG Development allocates the money.

Daniel Hannan says nobody cares about EU corruption. “is it, perhaps, that we expect the EU to be corrupt? For all that we complain about our MPs, we still want them to be honourable, and are upset when they fall short. MEPs, by contrast, are regarded as irredeemable. Brussels sleaze is not news.”

And in the First Post, he says the integration method is like guerrilla warfare: “never reveal more than absolutely necessary; never let in the daylight; above all, never draw up your phalanxes and offer pitched battle. ”

There’s a new issue of Social Europe Journal, with an essay by Will Hutton and an interview with enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn - download PDF (1.1 Mb).

Tim Worstall on restrictions to trade and industry from the Precautionary Principle: “the default position should be full free trade: those who wish to argue for restrictions would have to make their case”

Jan Seifert notes that the two main political groups have decided how power is to be distributed in Parliament after the 2009 elections. And MEPs have the nerve to criticise Zimbabwe.

The irony of a convicted criminal being put in charge of the Justice and Home Affairs department! Bruno Waterfield asks “with his own skeletons in the cupboard, with what moral authority will Mr Barrot be able to take up this policy?” (You need to work on your sentence structure, Bruno!)

A weird half-lobby group half-parliamentary educational scheme is to be evicted from Parliament, says the International Herald Tribune.

So European Voice reports that the Commission will next week propose making access to documents easier for EU citizens.

Interesting stuff. I rang up the press office to find out more.

Me: Can I see these proposals?

Press officer: I will send you what I can, but at this stage there may be information which can’t be published yet.

Me: I see. There may be information about proposals to facilitate access to EU documents, but I can’t have access to it?

Press Officer: …

Me: That sounds a bit funny. Does it sound funny to you?

Press Officer: I’m not an expert. This is the press office, and I will send you details of the number you need to call for general enquiries.

What is civil society? Some people think it’s a set of self-organising networks that are relatively free of state interference. It’s your local pigeon-fancying club, your church, your trade union, or the healthcare charity you sometimes send a cheque to.

Free and self-organising are the key words.

The vile interfering socialists in the EU think differently. Civil society is a tool for political and social engineering. Here’s the intro to a press release announcing one of their dreary conferences:

Non-governmental organisations, employers and trade unions, industry associations, charities, consumer bodies, faith groups, the media – civil society organisations are an essential part of European public life. They serve as a channel of communication with EU institutions and provide a forum for active involvement in preparing and implementing EU policy.

To sum up, civil society is a way of communicating with the EU and a forum for implementing EU policy. In case there’s any doubt about this naked social engineering, here’s what Commissioner Janez Potocnik said in a speech at the conference.

 Civil society organisations play a fundamental role during this process of change. They help developing a general understanding of how the EU works;… they enable citizens to feel part of the project.

Part of the project, indeed! The arrogance is incredible.