European Parliament

MEPs are being urged to strengthen a key resolution on lobbying transparency when it comes before the Parliament on Thursday 8 May or risk leaving large areas of lobbying activity unchecked.

Brussels, May 8 – The Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation in the EU (ALTER-EU) welcomes the European Parliament’s approval today of the report on “Framework for the activities of lobbyists in the EU institutions”. The report sends a strong message to the European Commission by calling for a mandatory register, including lobbyists names, their clients or funders and financial disclosure on registered lobbying activities. The Commission is expected to launch its own register in mid-June – but under current proposals this will be purely voluntary, and will not include meaningful financial data or the names of individual lobbyists. “Commissioner Kallas must now act and strengthen the Commission's weak proposals for EU lobbying transparency and ethics rules, as he recently committed to do”, says Erik Wesselius (Corporate Europe Observatory).[1]

EU lobbyists will in future have to register on a common parliament, council and commission list, according to proposals from a committee of MEPs. A report backed yesterday by parliament’s constitutional affairs committee – but yet to be endorsed by the whole parliament – seeks to make the rules for groups lobbying the EU institutions more transparent.

The Commission's upcoming lobbyists register should be mandatory and common to all three institutions, recommends a report adopted on Tuesday (1 April) in the European Parliament's Constitutional Affairs Committee. But some NGOs and transparency groups believe the proposals are inadequate.

A mandatory register--including financial disclosure requirements--for the approximately 15,000 lobbyists working to influence decisions taken by the three main European Union institutions
was approved April 1 by an important European Parliament committee.

With the Commission disappointingly choosing for a very limited, voluntary lobbyists' register, the European Parliament now must show the way and develop strong and effective transparency rules. This requires learning the bitter lessons from the last time these important issues were on the Parliament's agenda, more than a decade ago.

Administrative Affairs Commissioner Siim Kallas is planning to pressure MEPs to be more transparent about their financial interests by calling for minimum ethical standards for all officials working in EU institutions as well as setting up an independent advisory committee to judge cases of potential conflicts of interest.