MEPs must come clean on who’s lobbying who

EUROPEAN Parliament politicians have lost a lot of credibility over their reluctance to reveal how they spend their expenses.

The majority play fair and use their expenses to do their job. The rules have tightened up so the incoming MEPs will have less chance of cheating and must be more open about how they spend the money.

But there is another aspect to transparency that is at least as important for citizens: to know who is influencing legislation.

Written submissions to the European Commission and conferences to discuss planned legislation is available on the internet. But the more informal contacts are not so easy to trace.

Just a year ago the commission launched its lobby register, but it’s not compulsory for lobbyists to register. As a result less than a quarter of known lobbyists have bothered to sign up and the all-important law firms are boycotting it.

The parliament has a similar register, but voted to water down the rules exempting lawyers from registering. In April they began discussions with the commission on having a combined register and toughening up the rules. Unfortunately, the council representing the member states refused to take part in any register despite widespread lobbying of governments and very few countries having mandatory registers.

The combined parliament-commission register is likely to be one of the first issues the new MEPs will deal with. Hopefully, they will take on board a report by a civil society group, Alter-EU, that monitors how the commission’s register is working. They point out that law firms, think tanks and big companies are largely boycotting the register. They say registering must be mandatory, loopholes on financial disclosure must be closed and a list of those failing to comply must be published.

Their investigation shows that less than a quarter of Brussels-based lobby groups and individuals have registered since it was launched a year ago. Less than 600 of the estimated 2,600 lobby groups with offices in Brussels had signed up to the register at the end of May and many of the biggest firms were missing.

Only six law firms have registered and only one of them has offices in Brussels. This is despite law practices dominating EU-related consultancy markets and according to a 2002 study having almost half of the €663 million turnover in 1998 and 46% of staff – far more than both PR and lobby consultancies.

Law firm lobbying is booming with large US firms expanding into Europe and the arrival of new European firms. They provide strategic lobbying advice, draft legislative wording for their clients to present to decision-makers and engage in direct lobbying on their clients’ behalf, the report says.

If the MEPs want real transparency they will have to follow the route adopted in the US and make the register mandatory. The strange thing is all the big US firms operating in Brussels also work in Washington where they must give the kind of information they are battling so hard against having to give in the EU.