A global telecoms lobby with key files in the European Parliament gifted eight tech-focused EU lawmakers tickets to an annual innovation confab that are worth thousands of euros, an analysis by POLITICO found.
That’s business as usual for the annual mobile tech show known as MWC Barcelona. The big difference for the 2023 edition, held in late February: European parliamentarians actually disclosed the freebies.
Six MEPs submitted declarations that they received “leadership passes” valued at €2,416 from GSMA Europe, according to the analysis of disclosures. As the trade association for major network operators including Orange and Deutsche Telekom, GSMA is currently part of a pitched battle with Big Tech in Brussels over who should bear the costs of higher consumer demand for internet bandwidth — not to mention its stake in other big discussions about artificial intelligence and data access.
For lawmakers in Europe and beyond, MWC is a pivotal opportunity to hear from a broad swath of industry players while also learning about the fast-changing technology they’re tasked with regulating. It’s standard practice for politicians — and journalists, for that matter — to receive free passes to these events, with the rationale that the organizer shouldn’t profit from the public’s representatives.
“We usually get an invitation. It’s not strange for us,” said Italian MEP Brando Benifei, a Socialist & Democrat and rapporteur on the AI Act, who called the MWC “one of the most important events on the world level.”
Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton also attended MWC 2023. So did some 70 ministers and 100 heads of regulatory bodies, with delegations from more than 150 countries, according to GSMA.
Yet what makes it different this time around is that 2023 is the first year when multiple EU parliamentarians officially acknowledged receiving the tickets from GSMA in filings over meetings organized by third parties, per the POLITICO analysis. As the EU’s only directly elected institution grapples with a bribery scandal linked to Qatar and Morocco, the European Parliament has pledged to boost transparency.
The MEPs paid for their own flights and, with one exception, their own hotels. But GSMA offered free admission for MEPs and their assistants, along with invitations to a closed-to-the-press “ministerial programme” and roundtable discussion with top industry players.
“The passes are free for GSMA, but they have a monetary value, so we encourage MEPs to report as they’re above the threshold,” said Eusebiu Croitoru, a spokesperson for the European Internet Forum (EIF), which has been working with GSMA to organize the MWC trips since 2013.
A nonprofit organization that organizes assorted chinwags on digital files, EIF offers free membership to MEPs. It also offers corporate members the chance to join for a yearly fee ranging from €500 to €11,000. GSMA is among these corporate members; the leadership pass offer was extended to all MEPs in the EIF.
EU parliamentarians who disclosed the free ticket include Renew MEPs Bart Groothuis, Susana Solís, Ondřej Kovařík, and Rosa Thune. Two MEPs with the Socialists and Democrats, Tsvetelina Penkova and Paul Tang, also filed the declaration.
Groothuis, a top lawmaker on cybersecurity issues, said that after visiting some AI demonstrations at the conference, he was “astonished” to learn that it’s already possible “to search for errors in code/software. By experimenting in Barcelona, I also learned AI was capable of not just finding coding errors, but also repairing them.” This knowledge will drive his proposed amendments to the AI Act, Groothuis said.
Spanish European People’s Party MEP Pilar del Castillo, a Data Act rapporteur, did not post her disclosure until Tuesday (the day POLITICO sent questions to her office). The filings — uploaded after the Parliament’s deadline for such trips — now reflect her pass from GSMA, as well as two nights in the four-star Hotel Barcelona Center paid for by EIF, noting that she chaired and gave opening remarks at the roundtable.
While Benifei already disclosed meetings that he held in Barcelona, he technically has until the end of April to post the ticket disclosure (he stayed longer than the other MEPs, until March 1, and the disclosure deadline runs to the end of the month following gift receipt).
He’s not convinced the passes need to be declared, given that they cost GSMA nothing. Yet after hearing that his colleagues filed declarations, Benifei said he’ll do it too. “Just to avoid any issue.”