Phil Hogan's Brussels salary stood at €271,000 at time of leaving office

Former EU Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan File picture:Gareth Chaney/Collins

Former European Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan will be entitled to be paid €441,000 before tax over the next two years by the European Commission having severed ties with the European Union’s executive branch earlier this week.

Mr Hogan’s Brussels salary, which he had been drawing since 2014 when first nominated for the Trade Commissioner portfolio, stood at €271,000 basic at his time of leaving office.

Under European Union rules all members of the European Commission are entitled to a “transitional allowance” for the two years after they leave office in order to alleviate the restrictions placed upon them by the Commission’s ethical regulations.

That allowance corresponds to between 40% and 65% of a Commissioner’s base salary, depending upon their length of service.

For Mr Hogan — who had served six years as a Commissioner, one full term plus a full year in into his second — that rate is 55%, or €149,465 per annum.

The rules do not differentiate as to the reasons for why a Commissioner leaves their role, merely that ties have been severed.

In practice the transitional allowance is designed to alleviate the hardship for Commissioners or other senior European officials of not being allowed to freely choose their next role having left the Commission’s employ.

In other words, the rules are designed to mitigate a former Commissioner’s losses as the Commission can veto their leaving their role for a lucrative position in the private sector.

A period of two years was mandated by former European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker in 2018.

The transitional allowance is capped, meaning that should Mr Hogan take up gainful employment elsewhere subsequent to his resignation the amount of his new salary coupled with is allowance cannot exceed his Commissioner’s salary.

In practice this means Mr Hogan can work at a rate of €122,000 per year without affecting his severance allowance from the Commission.

The former Commissioner is also entitled to a resettlement allowance of one month’s basic salary, equating to €22,646, with all travel expenses and moving costs reimbursed.

In terms of Mr Hogan’s Commission pension, he is entitled to an annual payment before tax of 21.8% of his final salary, or €59,078 on the basis of six years’ service for a high level office holder within the Commission.

That salary is payable upon retirement to all former office holders over the age of 60, an age which Mr Hogan reached in July of this year.

Mr Hogan was a member of the Oireachtas from 1987 until 2014, with his first two years served as a senator.

He held two ministerial briefs, briefly in 1994-95 as Minister of State at the Department of Finance, and for three years between 2011 and 2014 as Minister for the Environment, before his nomination as Ireland’s EU Commissioner for Agriculture.

As such the former commissioner is entitled to both a TD’s and a ministerial pension. When Mr Hogan first joined the European Commission he said he would waive his entitlement to both Oireachtas payments, worth a combined €61,000 each year.

Dáil records show that in the years immediately following Mr Hogan indeed claimed no pension payments. Such records are now anonymised by the Oireachtas citing the advent of the General Data Protection Regulation.