Armies of lobbyists assail Brussels
BRUSSELS When the European Commission decided a few years ago that a vegetable sauce with more than 20 percent lumps was not in fact a sauce but a vegetable, Peter Guilford's clients - big manufacturers such as Heinz and Unilever - suddenly discovered that their trendy new thick sauces qualified for as much as a twentyfold increase in tariffs when they shipped them into Europe..
According to the European Union, vegetables are farm goods, and so face the EU's notoriously high agriculture trade barriers..
"We let the press know," Guilford, 44, an amiable British lobbyist, said one recent afternoon in his elegant offices - bare wooden floors, glinting mirrors - on a cobbled street in the heart of Brussels..
Guilford calculated that the European public, or at least the anti-EU media, would be shocked at the silliness of such a rule..
The commission even stipulated the size of sieve holes that had to be used in the tests for lumpiness..
"The Economist got it, then the Press Association," said Guilford. "Before long, the British government was calling up the commission, saying just stop it. We didn't have to do anything else.".
Guilford's sauce war was only one of the lobbying skirmishes that regularly break out in Brussels these days..
As the EU's powers have extended ever deeper into companies' lives, so the interest of businesses in defending their causes on the legislative battlefield of Brussels has intensified..
In the ensuing melees, they enlist professional emissaries like Guilford and the thousands of lobbyists who now throng the emerging capital of the European Union..
The battles pitch companies against EU institutions, national governments, rival businesses and civil groups - Friends of the Earth, for example. They pit lobbyists against the media in a tussle for their clients' reputations..
"One of our jobs is to prevent background noise from damaging relations," said Tom Brookes, a lanky young lobbyist in Guilford's agency who is one of the guardians of Microsoft's tender reputation in Brussels. "It is about keeping people calm.".
The issues are legion. Today in Brussels, companies are lobbying the EU on its proposed services directive, its chemicals directive, its health claims directive, its animal byproducts directive, and hundreds of other regulations it tosses out each year..
There are powerful car manufacturers such as Volkswagen lobbying furiously, fearing that the EU will let mechanics use any generic spare part to fix their cars, and not VW's high-priced ones. There are some car companies arguing loudly for the EU to soften its car safety standards; others want the EU to tighten the rules because they think their vehicles are safer than their rivals' and sniff a competitive advantage..
There are technology companies such as Philips that want the EU to protect their inventions that use software. .
There are other companies, as well as protesters in the streets, shouting that this is going to spell the death of innovation..
There are supermarkets terrified that the EU will look too closely at their latest healthy food lines and discover that the food is not, well, healthy..
Guilford wages battles about EU tariffs for Chiquita, the American banana producer. His clients include Aviva, one of the world's biggest insurance companies, as well as the banking group UBS and Toyota..
In 2000, when Mars, one of Guilford's clients, bought Royal Canin Pet Foods of France, his job was to make sure the EU did not block the deal..
Last May, when Lee Scott, the chief executive of Wal-Mart, visited Brussels, Guilford squired him around the EU's glass-faced offices. He sat him down with three commissioners, the stars of Brussels' bureaucratic firmament..
"We wanted to explain Wal-Mart's position in case it ever wanted to buy more supermarkets in Europe," said Guilford, who was a reporter for the Times of London and worked as a press spokesman and trade negotiator inside the commission for 10 years before starting his company, GPlus, in 2000..
Wal-Mart is not alone in wanting to influence what the EU thinks..
According to Susan Danger, managing director of the American Chamber of Commerce to the EU, U.S. corporate interest in Brussels is increasing, "especially in the area of financial services." .
U.S. law used to be the global standard, she said, but now, for example, "90 percent of environmental legislation around the world actually stems from the EU. It is key that U.S. companies get involved in legislation here.".
According to Thomas Vinje, partner at the law firm Clifford Chance in Brussels, the first big Brussels lobbying battle "that raised lobbying to an American-style level" was back in the years 1989 to 1991 and involved IBM's fight to keep its proprietary technology to itself..
"That was really a battle royal," said Vinje. "It marked the coming of age of the European Parliament as an institution to be lobbied.".
That struggle had echoes in the fierce battle last year by Microsoft to avoid, among other things, sharing information about its operating system with rivals..
Current hostilities focus on the commission's initiative that is known as REACH, which stands for Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals. .
This innocuous-sounding directive could force manufacturers to send their products - from paint to Dell computers to Italian shoes to Barbie dolls - back to the lab, retest them, and disclose the chemicals they contain. The cost to industry could be €5 billion, or $6.45 billion, or more, according to varying estimates, and it has unleashed a frenzy of lobbying..
"There is a lot of activity happening on REACH," said Martin du Bois of Cambre Associates, another Brussels lobbyist..
Guilford sees his job as educating outsiders in European ways..
"If you are a businessman coming from America, you can't just assume Brussels operates in the same way" as Washington, he said. "You have to Europeanize them.".
This means telling foreign business executives that Europe's "brightest and best" are often in the public sector, and that social issues such as the environment and how you treat your work force are more important in Brussels..
"Most of what you have learned in Washington, leave it at home," he said..
Guilford and his 22 colleagues at GPlus, a mixture of ex-commission officials and others including veteran journalists from Le Monde and The Financial Times, say lobbying has chiefly been an Anglo-Saxon preoccupation: Most of the firms that traditionally used private lobbyists in Brussels were British or American..
German and French companies tended still to use their national governments to lobby the Brussels institutions. This is changing as more companies are privatized and leave the public sector..
But until more Europeans take up the lobbyists' services, much of Guilford's day appears to be spent talking to clients across North American time zones..
"I may have a client in the office in the morning, followed by lunch 'al desko,"' said Guilford. "In the afternoon, the American clients wake up. I have a conference call with Chiquita in Cincinnati, then an e-mail exchange with Wal-Mart in Arkansas, and in the evening the high-tech clients in Silicon Valley wake up.".
The pay is better than the salary he earned as a journalist. But, laments Guilford as he climbs the stairs in his townhouse office, it is still overshadowed by the other professions that carve up Brussels' burgeoning corporate market..
"It is a fraction of what the lawyers get, which in turn is a fraction of what the bankers get," he said..
In fact, the biggest challenge for lobbyists, according to Michael Tscherny, Guilford's colleague, "is convincing the lawyers, who have been the traditional gatekeepers to a company's business, that we can provide that extra service that they can't.".
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