EU leaders have been put on the defensive after development charity Oxfam accused them of turning a blind eye to €9.5 trillion hidden in European tax havens. Oxfam, which lambasted what it described as EU "hypocrisy" ...

EU leaders will make another bid to agree rules on tax evasion after UK Prime Minister David Cameron called on 10 British tax havens to "get their house in order" on secret bank accounts. In a letter released Monday (20 ...

Austria and Luxembourg have blocked an EU deal to increase tax transparency. Their finance ministers dug in their heels at a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday (14 May) despite pressure from major EU states. Speaking to ...

British tax havens in the Caribbean have agreed to provide information on offshore bank accounts (2 May), in a step which increases the prospect of an EU-wide agreement on information exchange on overseas accounts used ...

The EU is hoping to reach agreement on automatic exchange of data on overseas bank accounts, according to a letter sent to national capitals on Wednesday (24 April). A letter from Irish finance minister Michael Noonan ...

EU companies will be required to publish information ranging from anti-corruption and bribery measures to their boardroom policies and employment practices, under new legislation unveiled by the European Commission on ...

MEPs and ministers have agreed groundbreaking rules requiring oil and mineral companies to report payments made to third world governments. The new rules agreed on Tuesday (9 April) will require extractive firms to ...

A five-year struggle to access documents came to an end on Monday (4 March) when the EU ombudsman welcomed the European Commission’s move to release papers concerning negotiations on the EU's rights' charter. The papers ...

The European Commission on Tuesday (26 February) fined the United Kingdom €111.7 million for failing to detect bogus farmland. A number of farmers received direct payments from the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) ...

The tobacco industry in Brussels spends over €5 million a year and employs around around 100 full-time lobbyists to influence EU legislation, says an anti-smoking advocacy group. “These figures are only the tip of the ...

The EU ombudsman on Thursday (14 February) launched an inquiry into the alleged failure of the European Commission to prevent conflicts of interest. The probe follows a complaint filed by a handful of pro-transparency ...

A handful of MEPs have copy-pasted amendments made by giant US-based IT companies directly into the EU’s new data protection law. Among the names cited by the London-based NGO, Privacy International, in a report out on ...

The "European Year of the Citizens" in 2013 will put a spotlight on one of the hardest-fought-for EU reforms, the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI). This new instrument - which says that if 1 million EU citizens from ...

Tobacco lobbyists and top European Commission officials held several quiet meetings over at least the past two years, says Brussels-based pro-transparency group Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO). Among them are people ...

One year on from the Olympics, the eyes of the world will again be on the United Kingdom next summer, as we host the G8 at Lough Erne in Northern Ireland. Some people ask: does the G8 still matter, when we have a G20? ...

Two weeks after ex-health-commissioner John Dalli's resignation in what has become known as "Dalligate" - a scandal described by public health campaigners as the biggest interference of the tobacco lobby in European ...

In the run-up to this week's European Council, new proposals for a "eurozone budget" have stirred debate in Brussels, Frankfurt and European capitals. This "fiscal capacity" has been presented by European Council ...

Jailed Russian punk band Pussy Riot are among nominees for the European Parliament's Sakharov prize after MEPs confirmed five candidates for the human rights award. The candidates were discussed by MEPs on Tuesday (25 ...

The European Commission adopted rules on Tuesday (25 September) to increase transparency on farmers who receive billions in EU subsidies every year. "We not only have to reform the CAP [common agricultural policy] to ...

Classified files can damage EU interests if they get into the wrong hands. But where is the line between security and transparency? What is the difference between a lobbyist and a spy? EUobserver investigates.

Andrew Rettman writes about foreign relations for EUobserver. He joined the site in 2005 and specialises in Israel, Russia, the EU foreign service and security issues. He is 37 years old and was born in Warsaw, Poland.

"SECRET UE" is the fourth in a series of EUobserver investigative reports. It looks at what kind of high-value information the EU institutions have, who wants it and how they are trying to protect it.

MEPs in the budget committee on Thursday (20 September) unblocked some €2 million in funding for European Commission expert groups after the executive agreed to implement new transparency rules. The advisory groups, ...

MEPs on the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee have piled fresh political pressure on their governments to impose sanctions on Russian officials linked to the murder of whistleblower accountant Sergei ...

The European Parliament is pushing for transparency laws that would require all large gas, oil, mining and logging companies listed on EU stock exchanges or domiciled in the EU to disclose payments they make to foreign ...

The Scottish government is facing renewed pressure to reveal legal advice on whether it would remain in the EU if the country votes to leave the United Kingdom. An urgent hearing of the Court of Session in Edinburgh ...

When Alan Greenspan was chairman of the US Federal Reserve, visitors to his office were confronted with a sign on his desk which said "the buck starts here." It was a wry reminder of the power that the Fed wields in the ...

EU justice commissioner Vivane Reding announced on Wednesday (12 September) a "justice scoreboard" to rank rule of law in the EU. "I am prepared to come once a year before this house to share with all of you the ...

The EU ombudsman has launched an investigation into an alleged conflict of interest by European Central Bank (ECB) chief Mario Draghi due to his membership in a club of top bankers, the Group of Thirty (G30). "We ...

From frivolous responses, illegible scrawls, to no answers at all, several members of the European Parliament are not serious when it comes to declaring their financial interests, a survey carried out by an NGO has ...

In the dark days of the financial crisis, as credit markets froze around the world amidst uncertainty and confusion, one thing at least was clear. The global financial sector had become interconnected as never before. ...

Romanian expats in Brussels gathered at the European Commission headquarters on Wednesday to tell Prime Minister Victor Ponta to "stop faking democracy" and to abide by EU law. The 39 year-old premier - who was ...

The European Parliament on Wednesday (27 June) reverted a controversial decision on the code of conduct for MEPs. The loophole enabled lobbyists to fund MEPs' non-business-class flights and to pay for hotel ...

A joint transparency register launched by the European Commission and the European Parliament precisely one year ago is riddled with inaccuracies and gaps. A report released on Monday (25 June) by the pro-transparency ...

The EU's 55,000 officials should be bound by a new set of "ethical principles", according to the head of the EU institutions watchdog. In a statement released Tuesday (19 June), European Ombudsman Nikiforos Diamandouros ...

EU and US co-operation in combatting terrorism remains shrouded in secrecy as Europol, the EU police agency, refuses to render public an inspection report that details how financial data is handed over to US authorities ...

EU data protection chief Peter Hustinx has warned governments not to water down new rules on data protection by excluding police and law authorities from the scope saying that such steps would be "inappropriate." The EU ...

A loophole in the European Parliament's code of conduct enables lobbyists to continue to fund MEP non-business-class flights and pay for hotel accommodation of up to €300 a day without disclosure. The Parliament's " ...

The Danish presidency has abandoned attempts to agree new rules on access to EU documents. It took the decision on Tuesday (12 June) after EU countries and the European Commission last week rejected its latest draft of ...

The Crisis of the European Union: A Response. By Juergen Habermas, translated by Ciaran Cronin. Polity Press, 2012; 140 pages; €19.80 at Wiley After two years of brinkmanship and eurozone firefighting, EU leaders are ...

The European Commission has said EU freedom of information rules should be tightened up because corporate lawyers and NGOs abuse the system. Its spokesman, Antony Gravili, told EUobserver on Wednesday (6 June) that most ...

The Danish presidency will next week put forward a second draft of new rules on access to internal EU documents, as tensions rise. The first draft fell by the wayside last week when EU parliament co-legislators said it ...

The EU should scrap the annual Declaration of Assurance (DAS) on the EU's accounts prepared by the Court of Auditors, (ECA) says its former president Jan Karlsson. Karlsson was speaking on Wednesday (30 May) during a ...

Big Oil is on the warpath. It hates the new transparency provisions in the EU Accounting and Transparency Directives which would require all EU-listed oil and mining companies to publish what they pay to governments ...

MEPs want to give the European Parliament's committees of inquiry sweeping new powers following a vote in Strasbourg (24 May). Under the proposals made by David Martin, the British centre-left MEP leading parliament's ...

MEPs are hoping to bridge the divide between ministers and the parliament on controversial plans to re-draft EU rules governing public access to EU documents. However, the institutions remain divided as they enter the ...

Azerbaijan beats up journalists, jails political opponents and bulldozes people's homes to build shopping malls, according to the latest resolution by the European Parliament. It is run "in a manner similar to the ...

Negotiators remain far apart on new rules to govern which internal EU documents can be released for public scrutiny. Jakob Alvi, the Danish EU presidency spokesman, told EUobserver on Tuesday (22 May) that member states ...

MEPs and the European Commission are embroiled in a dispute over what happened to €8.7 million originally intended for an EU-wide TV station. The commission put up the cash in a call for tender in 2008 for a Europe-wide ...