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Juncker’s year of living transparently

A look at what has worked — and what hasn’t — under the new lobbying reality.

The European Commission’s bold effort to throw its contacts with lobbyists open to public scrutiny will be one-year-old Tuesday, but not everyone is ready to celebrate the anniversary.

While the Commission has hailed its program as a shining example of how to open up the democratic process, some critics say the transparency regime is still in urgent need of reform.

The transparency rules, which came into force December 1, 2014, compelled all lobbyists wanting to meet commissioners, cabinet members and the Commission’s top civil servants to declare their legislative interests and spending on lobbying in an EU Transparency Register.

The lobbying changes put in place by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker also required details of these high-level meetings to be made public, enabling anyone with Internet access to discover which businesses, industry groups, consultants, professional associations and NGOs were involved in lobbying and what they were contacting the Commission about.

One year later, according to a survey by the website integritywatch.eu and POLITICO, Commission officials had disclosed more than 7,000 meetings with at least 1,800 organizations.

The new focus on transparency was a central plank in Juncker’s campaign for the Commission presidency, and most observers agree it has helped restore confidence in the EU legislative process, which had come under intense criticism after a scandal involving lobbying on the drafting of new tobacco laws.

But not everything has gone according to plan, and some critics say the transparency regime still needs improvement — and that it should be extended to other EU institutions — in particular the Council of Ministers.

The Commission has promised to review the rules and is slated to make an announcement on the future of its transparency regime before the end of the year.

Here’s a look at what transparency experts say has worked and what has not.

Everyone agrees: transparency is good

Before the Juncker lobbying reforms came into effect, EU officials were under no obligation to report their meetings with lobbyists, and lobbyists were under no obligation to sign up to the Transparency Register, an online database jointly managed by the Commission and the European Parliament.

But more importantly, before 2014 the Commission provided no incentive to sign up, condemning the Register to an existence of irrelevance hinging entirely on the goodwill of lobbyists whose clients often did not welcome public scrutiny.

However, lobbyists now say that they too had come to accept that the free-for-all of the previous regime was unsustainable and increasingly difficult to reconcile with their firms’ codes of conduct.

“I think [these changes] are for the better,” said Francesco Starace, the CEO and general manager of Italian energy company ENEL, which is signed up to the Register and declared an EU lobbying spend of over €2 million in 2014.

“I very much prefer that matters are held and managed under these transparency rules,” Starace said. “I feel much more confident that things are done properly here.”

A similar view is put forward by Markus J. Beyrer, the director general of BusinessEurope, the largest business lobbying group in Brussels.

“European citizens should know how political decisions are made in Brussels — which stakeholders offer their advice and knowledge and how they do it,” Beyrer said.

There’s lots of interest, but not always the whole story

Juncker’s new transparency regime thrust both the Transparency Register and the small secretariat which runs it into the spotlight.

The moment the changes were announced, in November 2014, lobbyists scrambled to sign up to the Register, which requires them to disclose the cost of their lobbying efforts, the number of staff involved and the expenditure of individual clients.

By October 2015, the register was receiving 60 new entries per week; by March that number had increased to 80 per week.

The new entries to the Register included companies with already well-established lobbying operations, such as Goldman Sachs, the Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Sovereign Strategy, Cisco Systems, McGraw Hill Financial and the consultancies SP&L and Global Sustain. There are now 8,700 entries on the Register.

But NGOs and transparency groups remain dissatisfied with the content of the entries, arguing the Register is full of mistakes and misreported expenses. In September, Transparency International alerted the Register’s secretariat to over 4,000 problem listings, arguing they contained either misinformation or poor data, or — in some cases — had data fields which had been left empty.

Hundreds of incorrect entries have now been updated — none of the mistakes highlighted by POLITICO in July are today still on the Register. But others remain.

Plan International España, a Spanish children’s charity, is listed as spending €4.7 million a year on lobbying, with a staff of 35 working full-time on lobbying activities. The Associazione Istituzioni Culturali Italiane, a cultural foundation based in Rome, declares less than €10,000 of lobbying costs annually while employing 1,000 lobbyists.

The new rules are having an effect

While the Juncker transparency measures’ impact on the lobbying industry may be hard to quantify, observers are adamant the changes are being felt.

“The requirement to be on the Register as a pre-condition to meet with commissioners and senior staff has had a clear impact in mopping up the last few notable absentees from the register,” said Justin Greenwood, a professor in EU studies at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen.

But NGOs remain adamant that whatever the progress, there are still too many loopholes in the transparency regime and lobbyists are still able to side-step scrutiny.

The problem, NGOs argue, is that Juncker promised a legally enforceable, mandatory register, but the incentives-based voluntary system now in place falls short of that commitment.

“We have been waiting for more than a year now, which raises doubts about how serious the Commission is,” said Paul de Clerck, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth, an NGO.

NGOs have called for an overhaul of the transparency measures, extending them to other EU institutions and broadening the scope of the mandatory reporting requirements to include all EU officials, rather than just the top departmental managers.

There’s more to come, but what?

In its 2015 work program, the Commission promised to put forward a proposal to reform the transparency rules by the end of the year and implement an inter-institutional agreement which would extend the policy to other EU institutions.

However, the Commission has now suggested to the lobbying industry that it will merely launch a consultation by the end of the year, and start talks with MEPs and EU ambassadors in 2016.

This delay has left both NGOs and lobbyists doubtful that reforms — particularly an inter-institutional agreement — can be achieved any time soon.

“In a perfect world we would have a harmonized, pan-European system … and that is not likely to happen,” said Karl Isaksson, the Brussels managing partner of lobby firm Kreab.

The issue is still considered a priority. The Commission’s first vice president, Frans Timmermans, will appear before a parliamentary committee Thursday to discuss the future of the transparency regime.

This article was updated to reflect new meeting data made available by Transparency International and to clarify that Justin Greenwood is a professor at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen.

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