STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Thursday, 23 February 2012

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44. Finance Watch – a lobby to break the lobbies

http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/1542771-finance-watch-lobby-break-lobbies

Joost Mulder knows all the tricks. For five years this clever Dutchman worked the Brussels legislative machine on behalf of financial institutions. Playing a political game in a network made up of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers of the 27 governments was his profession. Speaking four languages and knowing everyone, the 31-year-old glided smoothly through the bazaar of Brussels policymakers – he was a model lobbyist.

Sometimes he and his colleagues choked off legislative initiatives. Or else, using his contacts among officials at EU headquarters, he got hold of controversial regulations still at the first-draft stage just in time to organise a stream of objections from many seemingly independent sources. If there was merely an undesirable paragraph to be blocked at the Commission or in the European Parliament, it was simply a matter of putting together a blocking minority in the Council. “‘Lobbyists gladly promise their clients, ‘Give me a 10,000 euro fee and I’ll make sure your position becomes an issue in the Council,’” he says.

But things are different now. Mulder has turned a page. When last year financial lobbyists went so far as to “blackmail individual governments by threatening to withdraw capital and jobs, it was the final straw,” he says. “Making finance serve society” is now on his business card as head of the Public Affairs department of an organisation called Finance Watch.

Charlie McCreevy – a captive Commissioner

There too he has been hired as a lobbyist – only now he lobbies for a firm that is unique in the world of Brussels politics. At Finance Watch, experienced financial professionals aim to take on the might of the financial lobbyists and steer that power back to their own purposes: mobilising financial services for productive ends.