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Denmark, European Union

Vestager’s profile hangs over Danish election

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She’s not running for anything in Denmark’s parliamentary elections on Thursday, but even from Brussels, Margrethe Vestager, the country’s European commissioner for the high-profile competition portfolio, looms larger than just about anyone on the Danish political scene — included prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and her main challenger for the premiership.European_Uniondenmark flag

Less than a year into her tenure as the EU’s top cop on competition law, Vestager has moved forward with narrow charges (in the Commission’s parlance, a ‘Statement of Objections’) against Google for allegedly prioritizing search results from its own Google Shopping program over other results. Hardly a week later, she filed charges against the Russian state energy company, Gazprom, for anti-competitive behavior that the Commission argues resulted in higher prices in the Baltics, Poland and Bulgaria. In recent weeks, Vestager also open an investigation into whether Amazon was abusing its dominant market position to restrict innovation and competition in the e-book industry.

That’s made her, increasingly, a bête noire in the powerful Silicon Valley. Mike Honda, a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives for a California district representing Silicon Valley, denounced the charges in April, arguing that Google was instead one of the most ‘innovative and life-changing technologies in human history.’

It’s not just American and Russian companies — Vestager is also looking into allegations that Luxembourg’s aggressive tax deals with companies violated European Union state aid rules, even though most of the tax decisions came during the administration of Luxembourg’s prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker, now the president of the European Commission and who nominated Vestager for the role last autumn. She’s also investigating several European governments for providing assistance to their respective utilities industries.

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RELATED: How Helle got her groove back in Denmark’s snap election

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Not since Mario Monti took on General Electric’s Jack Welch and Microsoft’s Bill Gates has an EU antitrust enforcer taken such an aggressive tone with companies operating in the EU marketplace. It’s certainly a more direct, even transparent way of proceeding that her predecessor, Spanish commissioner Joaquín Almunia, who preferred negotiating closed-door settlements — a tactic that did not work, so far, with Google. In a throwback to the Monti days, Vestager last week threatened to block GE’s bid to acquire the French energy business Alstom without further modifications to the proposed merger — and that’s after the French government last year stepped in to demand a better deal.  Continue reading Vestager’s profile hangs over Danish election →

Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, European Union, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Slovenia, Sweden, The Netherlands, United Kingdom

The 13 key EU players in the proposed Juncker Commission

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On Wednesday, the incoming president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker (pictured above), released full details on the proposed commissioners within his Commission, which will serve as the chief executive and administrative body of the European Union between 2014 and 2019.European_Union

The most important feature of the proposed Juncker Commission is that he’s introduced the greatest amount of hierarchy in an institution that used to be flat. It’s not a secret that some portfolios have always been more desirable than others, especially as the Commission has expanded to include all 28 member-states. But Juncker has introduced a first vice president and five vice presidents, who will also serve alongside Italy’s foreign minister Federica Mogherini, who was appointed two weeks ago to serve as Commission vice president and high representative for foreign affairs and security policy.

The delegation of so much power to five ‘super-commissioners’ with roving, supervisory briefs indicates that Juncker intends to be a much less hands-on Commission president that his predecessor, José Manuel Barroso. But it also reflects a Commission that, including Luxembourg’s Juncker, contains five former prime ministers (Finland, Slovenia, Latvia and Estonia).  It also contains four incumbents (Germany, Sweden, Bulgaria and Austria) who have served throughout the full second term of the Barroso Commission. That makes the Juncker Commission possibly the most distinguished in EU history.

Each commissioner must be approved by the European parliament and, while individual nominees have had troubles in the past, the parliament typically approves the vast majority of a Commission president’s appointments, all of whom were nominated by their respective national governments.

With nine women, it’s not as unbalanced as feared even a week or two ago, and with 14 members of the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), eight members of the center-left Party of European Socialists (PES) and five members of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), it generally reflects the results of the May 25 European parliamentary elections, though some social democrats and socialists are grumbling that the left doesn’t have enough representation.

So what can we expect from this illustrious college of commissioners?

Here’s a look at the 13 most important players in the proposed Commission (aside from Juncker and Mogherini, of course). Continue reading The 13 key EU players in the proposed Juncker Commission →

United States

Reframing the issue of Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing: public vs. private

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Eleven years ago, in the wake of the Enron debacle, Congress passed protection for whistleblowers as part of a wide-ranging set of public company reforms within the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.USflag

Now consider that, instead of a former National Security Agency Central Intelligence Agency employee and, until very recently, a Booz Allen Hamilton employee, Edward Snowden (pictured above) were instead a disgruntled Facebook or Google employee, he knew about the voluntary cooperation with PRISM, and he honestly believed that Facebook and/or Google were enabling the NSA’s illegal activity.

If he (1) reasonably believed that his employer was breaking the law by cooperating with the NSA and (2) engaged in whistle-blowing activity as defined by Sarbanes-Oxley, would he have a claim under Sarbanes-Oxley for adverse employment action if Facebook or Google had fired him instead of Booz Allen?

Though the definition of whistle-blowing is relatively circumspect under Sarbanes-Oxley, let’s assume that for purposes of our example, Snowden ’caused information to be provided’ to a ‘government body conducting inquiries’ related to a ‘rule or regulation of the Securities and Exchange Commission.’  It’s a stretch, but certainly the participation of Facebook or Google in PRISM and the PRISM activities are material information to any potential investor and certainly affect shareholder value.

Would he have a Sarbanes-Oxley case against his employer for retaliating against him?*

More importantly, would John Boehner or Eric Holder or the American public generally be more sympathetic to him if the whistle-blowing came from within Facebook or Google and not from within the public sector?  Would the 1984 tropes be replaced by Atlas Shrugged tropes?

For the record, I think Snowden neither hero nor traitor, but I do immediately suspect the agenda of anyone who is certain of either.

I also think that the answer tells us much about how incredibly different U.S. politics is from world politics — that this is a relevant question is only possible in a highly individualistic culture like that of the United States, where distrust of government runs so high that one political party’s essential worldview for three decades has been ‘government is the problem.’

I don’t think re-framing the issue in these terms would make much difference in France or Brazil, let alone China, but I think it does in the United States.

* Theoretically, because Booz Allen is publicly traded, he might still have a case for retaliation, but I wanted my example here to be from the ‘private sector’ and not from the ‘public sector,’ though it’s obviously clear how blurred the line has become, even in a place like the United States, which we don’t think of the government as a large Venezuela-style actor in the private sector, and we like to talk about the ‘private sector’ and the ‘government’ as if there are bright lines between the two. (UPDATE: A commenter notes that when Snowden was revealed to have leaked the PRISM documents, the U.S. government would have revoked his clearance, which may have made him simply unable to carry out his duties under Booz Allen’s contract with the NSA, casting more doubt on why Snowden’s Sarbanes-Oxley case as a Booz Allen employee would be more farfetched.)