EPO General Consultative Committee (GCC) Agenda: Reduction of Staff's Salaries (Compared to Inflation)
The EPO's Central Staff Committee wrote to staff about "loss of purchasing power and below all benchmarks" (as covered here several times before, even last month). Benoît Battistelli shattered permanent employment contracts for staff; now the wrecking ball of António Campinos comes swinging, knocking salaries down some more. As the Central Staff Committee put it:
The President has tabled in the General Consultative Committee (GCC) meeting of 17 November a document on “Review report on the salary adjustment”.
The consultation was substandard. PD4.3 made high-level a presentation in a first technical meeting on 17 October 2025 and refused to provide a copy of the slides. On 22 October, a second technical meeting took place during which the Compensation & Benefits could not share the draft CA document CA/79/25 making any exchange on the content impossible. The document was tabled on 31 October in the GCC and no meeting ever took place in advance to discuss it.
This new salary adjustment procedure has, for the first time ever in the history of the EPO produced a systemic unequal treatment of staff in the different places of employment by not respecting the
purchasing power parities.
Over the period 2020-2025, Germany has even seen more severe capping than other places of employment creating lasting damage to the comparative purchasing power. Overall, all places of employment lost purchasing power in contradiction with the promises made by the President in 2020.
The average salary growth only reached -0.2% below Eurozone inflation and should be put in perspective with the fact that it is -0.4% lower than the planned +0.2% above inflation, and a difference of -0.7% to inflation +0.5% rather than the -0.3% predicted in the Financial Study 2019.
The parallelism with national civil servants is broken and all places of employment score below the benchmark with the Coordinated Organisations (COs) and the European Union (EU) institutions.
The results confirmed what the staff representation said in 2020: “The Office already has the worst career system of any International Organisation. It will now also have the worst salary adjustment method.”
They also spread around this 29-page document, which contains images and charts.
We could comment on parts of this document but are prioritising Cocainegate at the moment. It mirrors of overlaps what happens in Maharlika today, as the President's own family admits his cocaine addiction after years of him denying it [1, 2, 3] (and the republic's mainstream media helping the denial/cover-up). Cocainegate will be covered in the coming year as well. We have plenty of material left to cover. █