EU special advisers may be named

Legal advice will be sought before the team of special advisors to EU commissioners is named, it has emerged.

The existence of the 55 part-time counsellors was confirmed only last month, and press reports suggest that the commission is set to identify them following concerns about conflicts of interest.

But a spokesman for Siim Kallas, the commission's vice-president for administrative affairs, audit and anti-fraud,  insisted that due to data protection reasons, legal advice must first be sought, and the advisers told, before their identities are revealed.

“We still have to clarify the legal situation before any of these people are named,” he said.

The commission contacted its lawyers after Herbert Bosch, an Austrian Socialist MEP, wrote to the executive requesting that the names of the advisers be published.

The 55 advisers work between three and 60 days a year.

Seven are retired senior commission staff; they and 19 others are unpaid, and the rest get up to €612 a day.

The issue was highlighted after an industry lobbyist advising energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs was sacked for a perceived conflict of interest.

Rolf Linkohr, a German former MEP who runs a Brussels-based consultancy and is on the board of two companies, had been working for Piebalgs for two years.

In the wake of the Linkohr case, Kallas sent letters to all 55 special advisers last month asking them to confirm that there was no conflict of interest between their roles.

Kallas' spokesman could not say how many had, so far, replied.

“The commission publishes the names of other staff members and it favours naming the special advisers as it believes this will further increase transparency which is something Mr Kallas is committed to doing," he said.

Bosch was unavailable for comment.

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