Team Campinos Talks About SAP Days Before EPO Industrial Actions and a Day Before the "Alicante Mafia" Series (About Team Campinos Doing Cocaine)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 16, 2026,
updated Jan 16, 2026

SAP is Salary Adjustment Procedure [1, 2, 3, 4]

The Central Staff Committee at the EPO 'met' with the team of António Campinos just days before industrial actions, which are organised by the union. Then they circulated the following 4-page report:

Zentraler Personalausschuss
Central Staff Committee
Le Comité Central du Personnel

Munich, 15-01-2026
sc26009cp

Future Orientations on the Salary Adjustment Procedure
Report on the First Technical Meeting of 14 January 2026

The 6-year cycle of the 2020 salary adjustment procedure comes to an end. Mr Campinos intends to table the new “future orientations on the salary adjustment procedure” in the next meeting of the Council on 18 and 19 March 2026. The administration invited the staff representation to a first technical meeting on the topic, which took place on 14 January 2026 and provided presentation slides in advance of the meeting. This paper reports on the content of discussions.

“Financial sustainability” down to EZ inflation ± 0.0%
The administration explained that “financial sustainability” shall remain the main principle with a guaranteed growth of the salary mass at Eurozone (EZ) inflation ± 0.0%. They justified this as a reference by the fact that all staff and most pensioners reside in Eurozone countries, and therefore EPO expenses are in the Eurozone. The fees would remain adjusted to EU inflation as the Office receives patent applications from all over the EU.

The staff representation recalled that the long-term actuarial assumption of the EPO on the salary adjustments had already been lowered from “inflation” + 0.5% down to EZ inflation + 0.2% since the entry into force of the 2020 reform. At the time, the Office had justified this cut by the Financial Study 2019 of Oliver Wyman & Mercer. Since then, the alleged 5.8B€ gap¹ was entirely covered and there is even a large surplus cited as 4.2B€ in the Financial Study 2023². Therefore, there is absolutely no financial justification to lower the cap in salary growth by an extra 0.2%.

The administration stated that this new lower cap on the salary mass growth of Eurozone inflation will produce an extra 1.4B€ savings on long-term liabilities on top of the 2B€ already planned with the 2020 reform. The total target would now be 3.4B€.

The staff representation replied that the EPO is in an excellent financial situation thanks to the efforts of staff and we cannot understand why staff shall bear the burden of making yet more additional savings. The EPO would breach ILOAT jurisprudence which states that (e.g Judgment 3324, cons. 20), “the goal of achieving savings does not in itself constitute a valid reason for depriving staff of a salary adjustment to which they are entitled.”³

The staff representation stressed again that the two basic principles of remuneration policies among International Organisations are:

1) to maintain purchasing power i.e. the value of salaries and benefits, with purchasing power parities (PPPs) measuring the evolution of the prices of goods and services at specific locations relative to a reference (e.g. Brussels indexed on national HICP)

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¹ CA/83/19, page 4

² CA/23/24, page 5

³ Comments on GCC/DOC 23/2025, par. 63

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2) to ensure parallelism with wage inflation of civil servants (net of local inflation) via a specific indicator

No other International Organisation uses a “financial sustainability” principle on growth of salary mass with an arbitrary reference. The EPO would again severely depart from the basic principles of remuneration and attempt to reinvent the wheel with untested vague mechanisms bearing significant legal risks.

EZ inflation but as long as EZ is not high: a new “safeguard clause”
The administration announced that they are currently designing a new “safeguard clause” in case of high inflation. We are yet to see any single detail about it, but it has been described vaguely as having an aim to avoid high (e.g. two-digit) salary adjustments, that are not to the liking of the Council.

This is in stark contrast to the administration’s claim that this new proposal is an “improvement” for staff since it guarantees that we get EZ inflation, unlike the upper cap of the current method that just acts as a maximum. However, the “safeguard clause” looks very much like a secondary cap that would act as another limit to the adjustment, thus the guarantee is void.

The staff representation recalled that the two-digit adjustment that occurred in the past cycle was solely due to the poorly designed salary adjustment method (i.e. the sustainability clause with carry-forward) combined with the exception clause. Over the last 6-year period, a comparison of the results show that the historical underlying methodology would have produced much less volatile results⁴ than the current salary adjustment procedure.

On top of that, since the Office intends to remove the sustainability clause and the carry-forward “redistribution pool” that can be used to increase the salary scales, which was the main cause of the “high “ adjustment in a single year, there is no need for this new “safeguard clause”.

Review clause after 3 years: even less than EZ inflation ± 0.0%?
The administration explained that the reference growth of salary mass at EZ inflation ± 0.0% would not be guaranteed over the 6-year cycle of the next salary adjustment procedure. The regulations would include a review after 3 years allowing the Council to “modify” (e.g. further reduce) the reference.

The staff representation argued that this would again be an unacceptable risk for staff and a further breach of the purpose of a salary adjustment procedure. The basic principle of remuneration policies is to select the right indicators and to respect the result over time (stability) – not to change them based on recent outcomes.

No maintenance of purchasing power
The administration explained that while the growth of the salary mass would be referenced at EZ inflation ± 0.0%, the calculations for each place of employment would strictly maintain the “purchasing power parity coefficients” to respect the principle of equal treatment. This would be achieved via a mechanism of calibration of the country calculated growth factor.

The staff representation repeated that the aim of a salary adjustment procedure is to maintain purchasing power i.e. the value of salaries and benefits. This is not the same as purchasing power parity which is only a sub-clause intended to ensure equal treatment across different places of employment. A procedure which does not respect the evolution of the prices of goods and services at the reference country (HICP BE) would not respect the principle of maintaining purchasing power at all for any site.

The administration admitted that with the current proposal, some places of employment might be

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⁴ Comments on GCC/DOC 23/2025, par. 119

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below the evolution of costs of living (HCIP BE x PPP) and below their “local inflation” (national HICP). They added that over the last 6-year cycle, the implementation resulted in a yearly average at EZ inflation minus 0.2% which caused an erosion of salaries and benefits. However, the fact that the current method did not achieve its intention of providing EZ inflation + 0.2% due to poor drafting and a failure of the architects of the method to fully understand the implications, cannot be considered justification for them to cut further. Now, they pretend that with a EZ inflation ± 0.0%, this is an improvement and that there would be no erosion.

The staff representation replied that EZ inflation ± 0.0% cannot be the right indicator as it is calculated over a much broader territory than each place of employment. The right indicator to prevent an erosion is to respect the evolution of costs of living via HICP BE x PPP. The current proposal of the administration would cause a further erosion of salaries and benefits.

The staff representation reminded that in the Communiqué of 9 April 2020, Mr Campinos had assured staff that with the reform of the 2020 salary adjustment procedure “[t]here is no desire to cut staff purchasing power or impose unnecessary savings” but “There is a desire, however, to […] ensure salaries continue to grow, even above eurozone inflation”. This promise was broken over the last 6 years and the Office would further persist in breaking it.

No parallelism with civil servants
The administration announced that in order to simplify the salary adjustment procedure, the specific indicator would be removed from the formula, and hence the principle of parallelism with wage inflation of civil servants would be abolished.

The staff representation recalled that the specific indicator had been part of the historical underlying methodology since its inception in 1977. While the current salary adjustment procedure distorted the parallelism with civil servants since 2020 there was at least a reference to it in the formulas. The new proposal now totally ignores it. From a strategical and political point of view, this move would be a mistake. The specific indicator reflects how the eight reference countries among our Member States treat their civil servants and hence makes our salary adjustments less debatable to them.

The administration argued that the specific indicator is not an “acute point” of discussion. They pretended that the specific indicator can be considered to be legally linked only to the Noblemaire Principle which is however not applicable to the EPO according to ILOAT jurisprudence (Judgment 1912 and 4842). Therefore, there is in their view no legal necessity to maintain it. The Noblemaire Principle actually states that an international civil service should pay at least as much as the highest national civil service. This is completely different from wage inflation and hence is irrelevant to the specific indicator.

The staff representation replied that every International Organisation uses wage inflation in their remuneration policies. In growing economies, increases of productivity are rewarded with an increase of wealth, namely by an excess in salary adjustments over the evolution of prices of goods and services. In times of economic struggle, stagnations in salary growth are also reflected in the SI, such that the adjustments are aligned with the reference member states economic evolution. EPO staff have constantly increased productivity, yet we actually suffered from an erosion of salaries and benefits.

Finally, the staff representation noted that the Office is not consistent. Back in 2019, the Actuarial Advisory Group⁵ explained that the specific indicator was the indicator responsible for assuming in the long-term +0.5% on top of “inflation” in our salary adjustments. Now, if the Office removes the specific indicator from the underlying methodology, our salary adjustments remain in the long-term at “inflation” only and there is no need for any yearly calibration mechanism at EZ inflation.

More worryingly, when the staff representation noted the huge impact of a below local inflation adjustment that is applied also to the capped defined benefit of the New Pension Scheme, the

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⁵ CA/56/19, par. 66

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administration said they had not considered the effects. NPS members will be set to suffer from an erosion of their expected monthly pension. Furthermore, the Office ignored the effects on the salary scale of countries experiencing high inflation rates (e.g. Turkey, Romania).

Conclusion

At the time of drafting the present report, it was not fully clear to the staff representation how the explanations in the slides would be implemented mathematically, especially the “calibration of country calculated growth”. We therefore asked for the Excel sheets showing the explicit formulas that reproduce the simulations presented in annex of the slides. We were told we could expect to receive them before the end of the week.

According to ILOAT jurisprudence, while an International Organisation is free to choose a methodology, system or standard of reference for determining salary adjustments it must be a methodology which ensures that the results are stable, foreseeable and clearly understood or transparent. These principles currently do not appear to be fulfilled. First, the staff representatives have not been provided with the means for understanding the proposed salary adjustment procedure and are unable to calculate it. Second, the planned “safeguard clause” and “review clause” appear to be arbitrary as they would allow the Office to apply them when and if results are not to their liking.

The next Technical Meetings on the “future orientations on the salary adjustment procedure” are foreseen to take place on 19, 20 and 28 January.

The Central Staff Committee

The 19^th of January is a day before industrial actions commence and EPO staff that isn't morally feeble will insist on objecting to illegal instructions. █