Unveiling what the Office of the President-elect describes as "the strictest and most far-reaching ethics rules of any transition team in history" at the team's headquarters in the US capital, Podesta said Obama had vowed "to change the way Washington works".
Under the new rules, federal lobbyists "cannot contribute financially to the transition" and are "prohibited from any lobbying during their work with the transition". A gift ban has also been introduced "that is aggressive in reducing the influence of special interests".
No more revolving doors
To prevent potential 'revolving door' situations, the rules state that "if someone has lobbied in the last twelve months, they are prohibited from working in the fields of policy on which they lobbied" within the transition team.
Moreover, "if someone becomes a lobbyist after working on the transition, they are prohibited from lobbying the administration for twelve months on matters on which they worked".
Towards global ethics standards?
In Europe, Romanian MEP Daniel Daianu recently expressed the view that excessive lobbying of the EU institutions by businesses putting profit before moral values was giving industry a bad reputation (EurActiv 11/11/08).
Daianu went as far as demanding the establishment of "global ethics standards," claiming that the financial crisis had "emphasised the vital role of moral values and ethics" in preventing such situations in the future.
The European Commission's voluntary register of lobbyists, launched in June, lists the names of organisations rather than the names of individuals or the clients they represent. It requires consultancies and law firms participating in the register to disclose total revenue related to lobbying the EU institutions, citing either absolute amounts (brackets of €50,000) or percentages (brackets of 10%).
Corporate 'in-house' lobbyists and trade associations must estimate their costs associated with the direct lobbying of all the EU institutions, while NGOs and think-tanks must publish their organisations' overall budget and indicate their main sources of funding.
US legislation 'more structured' than EU counterpart
Comparing the EU scheme with the US Lobbying Disclosure Act, Miguel Veiga-Pestana, vice-president of global external affairs at Unilever, believes the US system is "more structured and formal for tax reasons, because some lobbying acts are tax-deductible and others are not". Different legal issues on each side of the Atlantic mean that the "EU cannot just copy everything from the US," he explained.
Burson Marsteller CEO Robert Mack believes lobbying rules in Brussels and Washington are different because the EU requirements were "non-specific". "The EU system need not necessarily mirror the US one, but should not put the burden on industry associations to provide their own guidelines," Mack said.
Meanwhile, the debate over lobbying regulation in the EU is set to continue until next summer, when the Commission will evaluate the success of its voluntary register and consider whether it should move towards a mandatory scheme.
