Jun 2009 26

You Know When You've Been Quangoed0

With hundreds of EU working groups and committees in existence, perhaps it’s time for an insider to put together a flow chart of who does what, and behind which closed doors.

The reason for this becomes clear when you read Commission Decision 2009/386/EC, lately published, appointing three new members to the Standards Advice Review Group. The existence of this body has passed by even cognoscenti of the inner workings of Brussels.

The Group "advises the European Commission on the objectivity and neutrality of the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group’s (EFRAG’s) opinions."

EFRAG is a private sector group of businesses representing capital market investors, with privileged access to the Commission; the Commission also sits on the board as an observer (surely in itself a reasonable location to be able to determine the objectivity of their submissions). Even at a glance, two members of the Board are clearly identifiable as business panjandrums sent from another group itself expressly set up to lobby the European Communities.

If you are of the opinion that the European Commission is a form of superquango in its own right – it certainly has the aspirations of a government entity without the accountability – then that means that a quango is advising another quango on whether or not to take the advice of a lobby group representing other lobby groups, notwithstanding the delegate of the quango to the lobby group. This is before any lobbying by national quangos is taken into account.

And we wonder why so few people vote in Euro elections.

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