Five things we learned from the transparency register

The new disclosures raise as many questions as they answer.

The EU’s new focus on transparency answers a lot of questions about lobbying in Brussels — who’s meeting with which Commissioners and top staffers, who’s spending what, who cares about which issues — but it also raises a lot of other ones.

The last few weeks have seen a heightened level of interest around the EU’s Transparency Register, an online database of information about lobbying activity to which individuals and organizations must sign up if they want access to officials in the European Commission and European Parliament.

The Commission set a late April deadline for lobbyists to update their disclosures in the register; anyone who failed to do so risks losing access to policymakers. Thousands of individuals and organizations met the deadline, but many others didn’t.

EU officials and transparency campaigners have hailed the new disclosure system for helping shine a brighter light on lobbying in the EU, but they say there are still questions about the accuracy and thoroughness of the entries — and a lack of enforcement mechanisms for those who ignore or circumvent the rules. In any event, it’s now easier to pay close attention to the influence game.

As European Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly put it at a recent Brussels conference, lobbying and transparency have “come right in from the margins and on to center stage.”

That may be the case. But you still have to know what the Registry says — and doesn’t say — about lobbying in the EU. Here are five things we’ve learned so far from the latest round of disclosures:

You miss one deadline, you get another

Anybody who wants to lobby the European institutions must sign up to the EU Transparency Register. This is the only way to gain access to the European Commission’s top officials (Commissioners, their cabinets and directors-general) but also the European Parliament building.

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For lobbyists, having access to those institutions is crucial to influencing the legislative process — though loopholes do exist.

But a recent deadline gave one clear sign of who is active and who isn’t. The Commission set a deadline of April 28 for all entrants on the register to update their information; after that, any registrations that had not been properly updated were frozen. On April 27, there were 8,496 organizations on the register. According to Transparency International, 1,552 organizations on the register missed the deadline.

The people and organizations on the frozen list have until the end of May to resubmit their data, so it is not yet possible to gauge how many of them will take advantage of the extension and submit the necessary information. If they miss this second deadline, they lose their access to EU institutions.

Who got frozen out?

Who disappeared from the list? According to data collected by Transparency International, most are non-governmental organizations (NGOs), companies, national federations or consultancies based outside of Brussels. Most of the frozen registrations were for people and organizations in Germany, the UK, Spain, France and Italy.

But a few Brussels-based companies or federations also failed to register in time. Among the biggest names: Gazprom, Twitter, and Air France. A comparison of the register before and after the deadline shows that at least 50 Brussels-based organizations working on EU affairs were removed temporarily.

“We forgot to do it, thank you for flagging this up,” was the common refrain among organizations POLITICO asked to explain their disappearance from the list. But others were surprised to see their names in the data of frozen registrations, arguing that the joint-secretariat for Transparency did not take into account their update.

Others simply couldn’t be bothered. “We decided to leave the Transparency Register, because it is too complex, rules are changing all the time, and it is impossible to fulfill the data honestly for the smallest structures like us,” said Baki Youssoufou of We Sign It, an online petition platform based in France.

Commission or omission

It is impossible to know today just how many entries will be erased from the Transparency Register by the end of the month. But it it is certain that the total number of listings will have decreased for the first time since the launch of this register in June 2011. In that sense the new deadline is cleaning out non-active entries from earlier.

This will reverse, at least for a short period, the trend of increasing participation over the last four years. There was a a significant boost in new registrations in November, when European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced a new focus on transparency and said his officials could not meet with anyone not on the register.

The rate of registrations rose 10 to 15 percent on weekly basis after the launch of the Commission’s campaign to boost transparency.

The rules aren’t likely to change again

The Commission seems content to have drawn the line at requiring disclosure of meetings with Commissioners, cabinets and directors-general — though there have been calls for it to go further.

Answering a question at a May 11 conference in Brussels on whether the rules should be expanded to include desk officers and heads of unit — who are often targeted by lobbyists — Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans said he was against the idea.

“They are not decision-makers,” he said.

But critics of the current system say that expanding it is not a question of creating additional red tape; all that is required is to forbid civil servants to meet anyone not listed on the register.

“It is very simple to do and does not cost anything,” said Daniel Freund of Transparency International.

NGOs are pushing the Commission to propose a legally binding register for all EU institutions but the Parliament and the Council oppose such a measure, arguing that it would require a change of the Treaties.

People are watching

The requirement for an annual update was serious enough to prompt many organizations in the Register to make significant changes to their public disclosures. Transparency watchdogs — NGOs and journalists — quickly scoured the new listings and called attention to the more interesting updated entries.

One such example that caused a stir was the updated registration of US investment bank Goldman Sachs, which reported spending €800,000 on EU lobbying activities in 2014, after having declared €50,000 in 2013. Critics say the 2013 figure was an understatement of the firm’s true lobbying activities; Goldman says the new number reflects the fact that it opened a Brussels lobbying office last year.

Public scrutiny of the register is already having an effect. Earlier this month, POLITICO reported that Juncker’s staff was not synchronizing his weekly activities with its table of disclosed meetings. Ten days later, the information had been updated to include all the meetings Juncker has had with the private sector, even those who met with the Commission President in their “personal capacities.”