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Street protests, petitions and a row over undeclared financial interests heralded the start of parliamentary hearings into the suitability of former oil mogul Miguel Arias Cañete to be the EU’s next climate and energy commissioner.
Hundreds of protestors – some dressed in Cañete face masks – gathered outside the European parliament, while the online activist group Avaaz, which has collected 300,000 signatures against Cañete’s candidacy, claimed that thousands of angry constituents had been phoning in complaints to their MEPs.
“This is pretty big in the sense that the petition was only launched about 24 hours ago,” said Luis Morago, Avaaz’s campaign director. “People normally don’t care about the formal appointment of a commissioner but the number of signatories shows that citizens at large can see the scandal that will develop if this man, with his huge conflict of interests, is appointed as a climate leader.”
Cañete changed his members’ declaration of interests on Tuesday to include payments for acting as chairman of the election committee of Spain’s ruling Parti Popular. A PP spokesman told El Pais that he had “possibly forgotten” to declare these earlier.
Jordi Sebastien, a Spanish Green MEP, linked the revelation to a financial scandal that has hit the PP over an alleged slush fund used for funnelling payments from big business to politicians. “He has changed his members’ declaration of interests twice in recent weeks,” Sebastien told the Guardian. “It means that he has a ‘dark’ interest that public opinion now knows about.”
Some environmentally-focused MEPs, such as the German conservative Peter Liese, have defended Cañete as a stalwart supporter of a strong carbon price in votes during the last parliament.
But the nomination of the former agriculture minister, who El Pais described as “always being on the edge of a conflict of interests,” has been controversial from the outset. A former president of two oil companies, Cañete sold his shareholdings in Petrologis Canarias and Ducor SL, but his brother-in-law Miguel Domecq is a director of both. His son Arias has resigned as a board member at Ducor.
Cañete’s approval will partly depend on the strength of his performance in the three hour grilling by parliaments environment and industry committees, which began at 5pm on Wednesday. More telling though may be the adhesiveness of a gentleman’s agreement between the new parliament’s two biggest groupings, the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) and European Peoples Party (EPP).
This is based on a Mexican stand-off in which the EPP would vote down the S&D nominee for economic commissioner, Pierre Moscovici, if Cañete is rejected at an MEP’s co-ordination committee on Thursday.
Jo Leinen, a S&D MEP on the environment committee claimed that a lack of clarity about Canete’s business affairs was creating a groundswell for rejection of Cañete among socialist MEPs.
“I would say that our group is negative towards him as there are too many conflicts of interest and his financial declaration was problematic,” he said. “One has a problem to trust him on the climate portfolio.”
That view was echoed outside the parliament by Molly Walsh, 29, a protester from Ireland.
“I don’t think someone with such close connections to the oil industry is a good person to be Europe’s climate and energy commissioner,” she said. “I think that oil connections and fossil fuels distort how our democracy works and corporate power and influence is increased when these types of people are given top jobs.”
