Alan J Donnelly

This article is part of the Nuclear Spin project of Spinwatch.

Alan Donnelly is the former leader of the Labour group in the European Parliament, now a lobbyist and co-founder of Sovereign Strategy.

According to Donnelly he had wanted to set up a lobbying firm for some time:

I'd always wanted to set up my own company, that was another big motivation to leave politics, and eventually I decided to bite the bullet and set up Sovereign Strategy. I'd been on the receiving end of lobbying for 11 years, I'd seen the good approaches and the bad ones, and over time I'd developed my own ideas about how I'd do it.

His assessment of the various approaches to lobbying seem to have resulted in the adoption of strategies almost designed to court controversy.

Background

From a biography on the Euractiv website:

Alan Donnelly was born on 16th July 1957 in Jarrow.

He was first elected to the European Parliament in 1989, representing the constituency of Tyne and Wear. He was re-elected to a second term in 1994 and finally elected to represent the North East of England in 1999. Until his retirement from the European Parliament in January 2000 he was Leader of the Labour Party in Europe, a post he held for two years.

He specialised in economic, monetary and industrial affairs throughout his parliamentary career, authoring many specialist reports on EMU, information technology and maritime policy. For five years he was the Parliament's spokesperson on the automobile industry. For seven years, Alan chaired the European Parliament's Committee for Relations with the United States Congress and was actively involved in creating the Trans Atlantic Business Dialogue. In this context, he organised and Chaired the Transatlantic Automobile Industry Forum on international regulatory harmonisation in Washington DC.

He led the European Parliamentary Delegation to the special G7 summit on the development of the global information society, sharing the platform with the US Vice-President, Al Gore. He is a founding member of the London School of Economics Observatory on the Information Society.

Following his retirement the British Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Tony Blair MP, praised his "talent and drive" and said he had been an "outstanding member of Labour's team in Europe".

Nuclear sleaze

Just days after the appointment of Labour's David Miliband as Environment Secretary in 2006, The Sunday Times reported on how Miliband was “embroiled in a sleaze row … over his links to a nuclear industry lobbyist. The lobbyist — Alan Donnelly — chairs the minister’s local constituency party”.

According to the paper, Donnelly and Sovereign Strategy represented the US multinational Fluor, one of the world’s biggest nuclear companies, which at the time hoped to win a stake in the £70 billion British nuclear waste market. Donnelly also founded and helps run the Transatlantic Nuclear Energy Forum (Tanef), an organisation that aims to foster “strong relationships” between nuclear power companies and governments.

Directorships

• Transatlantic Nuclear Energy Forum - current as at November 2012
• North East in Europe Ltd - current as at November 2012, registered address 60 Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DS

External resources

• Brian Wheeler, Analysis: Labour and the nuclear lobby, BBC News, 23 May 2007