Jose Manuel Barroso, and other EU leaders. Paimages/Geert Vanden Wijngaert. All rights reserved.José Manuel Barroso, the former president of the European Commission, has recently accused his former employers of being “discriminatory.”
This is not an issue about his pension or the generous “transitional allowance” that other commissioners have been able to claim, but about his referral to an ad hoc ethics committee tasked with investigating his new role as Chairman of Goldman Sachs International.
The former Portuguese Prime Minister insists he has been unfairly singled out. “I have not been engaged to lobby on behalf of Goldman Sachs and I do not intend to do so”, he told the current Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker. He has also pointed to the fact that he has not taken up the Goldman role within the 18-month “cooling off” period that EU rules demand – instead he held out for 20.
