Parliament Hearing to Focus on BBC Severance Dispute

Mr. Thompson, who left the BBC in 2012 and is now the president and chief executive officer of The New York Times, has challenged July testimony by Mr. Patten about how much the trust was told about a series of large severance payments to executives who left the corporation in an effort to reduce costs.

In a 25-page witness statement submitted to Parliament on Friday, Mr. Thompson has accused the trust, which represents the interests of ordinary Britons who pay an annual television fee that goes to the BBC, of misleading the committee and the National Audit Office.

In July, Mr. Patten expressed surprise at the details of important severance payments, which were larger than contractually mandated, according to the auditors, while Mr. Thompson insisted that the trust had been fully informed and raised no objections. In particular, Mr. Thompson’s deputy, Mark Byford, was given a full year’s salary in lieu of notice despite having worked an additional eight months when the deputy’s job was eliminated.

One of the documents Mr. Thompson has presented is a briefing memo prepared for Mr. Patten explaining the payments, which were approved before Mr. Patten became chairman of the trust. He said that Mr. Patten’s testimony in July was “fundamentally misleading about the extent of trust knowledge and involvement.”

In a statement, the trust called Mr. Thompson’s submission “a bizarre document,” said that “we completely disagree with Mark Thompson’s analysis,” and said that Mr. Patten and Anthony Fry, a trustee, had not misled Parliament. Mr. Patten had not had “a full and formal briefing on the exact terms of Mark Byford’s departure,” the trust said.

Mr. Patten has come under considerable criticism for the large severance given to Mr. Thompson’s successor, George Entwistle, who lasted only 54 days in the job. He resigned in November over a reporting scandal, but was given a full year’s salary in addition to a normal severance payment. The furor over that package has made the earlier payments more politically delicate.

Both Mr. Thompson and Mr. Patten will appear before the Public Accounts Committee on Monday.

Swiss Parliament Scuttles U.S. Deal on Bank Secrecy

Switzerland’s Parliament on Wednesday scuttled an information-sharing agreement with the United States that the Swiss government had hailed just weeks ago as a breakthrough in a dispute over banking secrecy, but left open the possibility for another solution.

The Swiss government said in late May that it would let banks hand over data on American clients’ hidden accounts without violating the country’s bank secrecy laws. The move was meant to help Swiss banks head off the possibility of criminal prosecution for helping Americans evade taxes.

But the proposal proved contentious in a country that has long prided itself on the discretion of its bankers, and it failed to gain the necessary support.

Some members of Parliament raised concerns about the precedent that any such agreement might set at a time when Switzerland’s banking secrecy is also under attack from the European Union — of which the country is not a member. They also complained that the terms were not fully revealed and that the Swiss federal authorities were pushing Parliament to pass the deal by Friday, to go into effect July 1.

The Parliament did signal its willingness to find an alternative. Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the Swiss finance minister and president of the governing Federal Council, said in a statement that the government “will do all it can within the scope of its legal powers to allow the banks to resolve the tax dispute.”

The Swiss news service Agence Télégraphique Suisse said Ms. Widmer-Schlumpf had urged Parliament to let banks take the United States up on its offer. “Washington knows no forgiveness,” she told legislators.

The Swiss have been working to assuage officials in Washington since 2009, when UBS settled with federal authorities in a tax evasion case. UBS, the largest Swiss bank, paid a $780 million fine and agreed to hand over 4,450 client names to resolve accusations that it helped wealthy clients avoid taxes.

The Justice Department has since begun investigations into a dozen Swiss banks. One bank Wegelin & Company, which was indicted, ceased operations.

The failure of the bill Wednesday could prompt Washington to take new action against Swiss lenders.

The Swiss Banking Association said in a statement that it “regretfully takes note” of Parliament’s decision, saying that such a law would have been the best means for helping banks “make use of the U.S.’s program in order to draw a line under the past.” The group called on the Swiss Federal Council “to assume its responsibility and do everything in its power to ensure that a legal framework is created that nevertheless renders the implementation of the U.S. program possible.”

The consequences of the rejection “are incalculable,” the banking association added. The Justice Department declined to comment.

There is wide recognition in Switzerland that a deal with Washington is essential to wipe the slate clean. Actual client data would not have been turned over, but authorities in the United States could have made use of the information to track down tax cheats. Critically, in a country where disclosing such information violates the law, bank employees would have been protected under the proposed deal.

Bits Blog: Tougher European Data Protection Measures Proposed by a Member of the European Parliament

In the end, all of those trans-Atlantic flights may not have paid off.

Over the last year, representatives of the United States government and American technology companies have repeatedly traveled to Brussels and Strasbourg in the hopes of containing an effort by the European Commission to strengthen data protection rules for citizens of the European Union.

But on Tuesday morning, Jan Philipp Albrecht, a representative of the European Parliament reviewing the draft regulation, made public a report in which he proposed even stronger measures.

Mr. Albrecht’s proposals represent his own opinions and may not be approved by his parliamentary colleagues. Even so, his recommendations indicate that American lobbying efforts are up against European momentum.

“I think they are trying to slow a moving train, which is difficult to do,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington.

Last January, the European Commission introduced a draft proposal for new data protection rules. The proposed rule would supersede a data protection directive from 1995, which laid out principles for each member state to enact individually.

The draft regulation clarifies and elaborates on those original principles — such as the need for companies and institutions to obtain citizens’ consent before collecting information about them.

It would grant European Union citizens a fundamental new right: data portability or a citizen’s right to easily transfer his or her own personal posts, photos, and video from one online service site to another.

And it comes with a big stick: Companies that violated the rule would be liable to penalties of up to 2  percent of worldwide revenues.

Although the effort is intended to standardize and consolidate the enforcement of data protection regulation across the 27 European Union countries, some American regulators, industry groups and scholars have objected. They say the draft rule was overly broad and burdensome for technology companies to carry out.

Now Mr. Albrecht has proposed further strengthening the data protections by granting citizens additional control over information collected about them — like the right not to be subject to profiling. In his report, Mr. Albrecht, a member of the German Green Party who is the representative of the European Parliament committee reviewing the draft proposal, also said citizens must consent to data collection by opting in and not be asked to opt out by changing a preselected option like a already-checked box.

“The use of default options which the data subject is required to modify to object to the processing, such as preticked boxes, does not express free consent,” Mr. Albrecht wrote.

In a phone interview, Mr. Albrecht said the European Parliament was likely to strengthen parts of the proposed regulation. “There is a huge interest of European citizens in having strong data protection,” Mr. Albrecht said.

That could pose challenges to technology companies.

Granting people the right to transfer the updates and photos they posted on Facebook to Google Plus, for example, may sound perfectly reasonable, said Yianni Lagos, a legal and policy fellow at Ohio State University and the co-author of a recent analysis of the European draft regulation published in the Maryland Law Review. But the proposed rule broadly requires that a company transfer a person’s data “without hindrance” and in a commonly used format.

“We’re not exactly sure what that means,” Mr. Lagos said.

“The largest challenge is the concept of interoperability,” Mr. Lagos said. “Translating from a coded format to a commonly used format, that is what will be difficult and costly to achieve.”

Unhindered transfer of a person’s entire record could also increase the breadth of identity theft, Mr. Lagos said: “One-time access by a hacker could turn into a lifetime data breach.”

Technology companies, he added, must now face the increased liability that could come with the proposed penalty for violators.

“The big difference is the fine,” Mr. Yianni said. “Now there’s a lot more reason to comply.”