Campaigners blast EU lobby register plans

Transparency campaigners have slammed as “fundamentally flawed” Brussels’ plans to introduce a voluntary register for EU lobbyists.

Speaking at a press conference on Monday ahead of the launch of the register by EU administrative affairs commissioner Siim Kallas, Jorgo Riis, member of the alliance for lobbying transparency, Alter EU, questioned whether the new lobby register had “any value at all”.

Riis, also Greenpeace European director, said, “The end product is proof that commercial lobbyists have effective influence in Brussels.  Why has the Barroso commission not pushed further on transparency?”

Riis and others in the campaign group argue that the new voluntary register will fail across a number of key transparency benchmarks.

According to Alter EU, individual lobbyists will not be named, meaning there will be no exposure of scandals, no trace of revolving doors (where former EU staff land lucrative jobs with lobbyists), no information on possible conflicts of interest and continued confusion over the number of lobbyists active in Brussels.

The group also believes that new rules for financial disclosure are fundamentally weak and skewed in favour of industry lobbyists, that financial reporting will not be comparable, and that lack of common data on disclosure rules means that the information published cannot be compared or aggregated.

“The information [to be provided] is ambiguous,” said Erik Wesselius of Corporate Europe Observatory, adding that there is a “big problem” concerning “the lack of information on individual lobbyists and their clients”.

“The voluntary lobby register is more of a token gesture for transparency than an actual step forward,” he said.

“The commission is obviously more worried about protecting the identity of lobbyists than it is in increasing transparency and restoring citizens’ trust in the EU at a time when such trust is needed most.”

Riis said that the blame for the weak proposals should be laid squarely at the feet of commission president José Manuel Barroso, telling the assembled journalists that the office of commission secretary general Catherine Day had effectively wrested control of the plans from Kallas and “softened the proposals into a state where [lobbyists] will probably sign up”.

“This commission has disappointed us. The fight for transparency is an uphill struggle. Kallas has found that out for himself,” Riis said.

“You have to ask whether [the lobby register] has any value at all.”

Craig Holman, from US transparency group Public Citizen, added, “When you compare [the new register] to other tested systems, such as in the US, its voluntary nature and distortion in fact make it look like one of the world’s weakest registers.”

“Today’s announcement from the commission is not transparency. Those [companies] that don’t want to tell you what they are doing, won’t.”

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