Lifting the Lid on Lobbying in Bulgaria

Over half the entries for lobby organisations on the EU Transparency Register contain factual errors or implausible numbers according to new analysis published today by Transparency International. TI has therefore filed 4,253 official complaints with the Secretariat of the Transparency Register. The register is designed to keep undue influence by lobbyists at bay and provide transparency on lobbying activities and spending in Brussels.

Today’s submission of complaints follows the launch of new lobby monitoring tools on www.integritywatch.eu in June 2015. The tools provide for the first time a comprehensive overview of lobby meetings of the European Commission and systematically analyse the declarations filed by lobby organisations with the Transparency Register. But findings also show the poor data quality of the register.

“A few simple plausibility checks reveal that data which lobbyists voluntarily file with the lobby register is inaccurate, incomplete or outright meaningless”, says Daniel Freund from Transparency International EU. “Among the hundreds of useless declarations we found organisations claiming to spend more than €100,000,000 on EU lobbying or having tens of thousands of lobbyists at their disposal. We hope that the Commission will swiftly follow up on our complaints and ensure that either the declarations are corrected or non-cooperative organisations are removed from the register.”

The full text of the press release by Transparency International-EU Office can be found here.