The influencers

15 April 2009

Strengthened lobbying regulation in the US under the Obama administration has cast EU lobbying regulation in a poor light, writes Stephen Gardner. With a flourish of the presidential pen on his first day in office, Barack Obama tightened controls on Washington DC's lobbying industry. His order sought in particular to close the revolving door through which government officials go to take lucrative lobbying jobs. From now on administration appointees are to be barred from doing this while the administration that appointed them remains in power, Obama said. Contrast this with Brussels. The European Union's capital considers itself the world's second lobbying centre but, compared to Washington DC, its lobbying regulation is strictly second division. US lobbyists must comply with the Lobbying Disclosure Act and file detailed quarterly activity reports. The European Commission has a voluntary register, and enforcement of what rules there are on questions such as revolving doors is “very weak”, according of Erik Wesselius, of campaign group the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency & Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU). The Commission's "register of interest representatives" was launched in mid-2008, and boasted on 19 February 2009 that it had reached the milestone of 1,000 registrants. Most of these are industry federations (around 400 have signed up), or NGOs, including organisations such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace (more than 200 registrants). By appearing in the register, the relatively low number of public affairs consultancies that have signed up (around 30) disclose the names of their clients, and a very broad breakdown of their lobbying turnover. We now know, for example, that international influencers Hill & Knowlton lobby on behalf of interests as diverse as Russian oil giant Rosneft, and the European Breakfast Cereals Association. Signing up to the register commits registrants to follow a seven-point code of conduct, which is largely concerned with making clear declarations of interest in pursuing lobbying activities. Transparency test failure ALTER-EU say the register has "failed the transparency test." It estimates that only a fifth of Brussels-based representative organisations and pressure groups have signed up, while some of the lobbying big guns, such as international law firms and think tanks, "appear to be boycotting the register." The register has also been spammed with deliberately false or simply mistaken entries. The Cheerleading Federation of Ireland, for example, apparently signed up in the belief that it would help them apply for EU funding. But a British Liberal member of the European Parliament, Diana Wallis, says the evolving EU system has been unjustly criticised, and comparisons with the US are unfair. Lobbying of the US federal government needs careful control, she argues, because US administrations control hundreds of billions of dollars in spending, which is what most lobbyists want a slice of. In the EU, lobbying is more about modifying the small print in legislation. Wallis says she would prefer the EU to end up with a system of mandatory registration for lobbyists, but what has been done so far is "going in the right direction." Wallis is part of a working group looking into a common code of conduct for lobbyists targeting the European Commission, which proposes legislation, and the European Parliament, which scrutinises it. The Parliament does have a lobbyists' register, which firms must sign up to in order to gain entry to the Parliament. This register "has more to do with security and access cards than being a transparency register," ALTER-EU's Wesselius says. Wallis concedes that, with European elections coming up in June, the working group is not likely to propose more than a web page that will be a "common entry point" to the Commission and Parliament registers. The group is likely to make its recommendations in early May. For the future, further measures will be considered -- though nothing like the tough mandatory standards seen in the US. A register of lobbyists covering all EU institutions may be put forward, but, Wallis says, this will be something "left on the shelf for the new Parliament and Commission" after 2009. The uncomfortable portrayal of Brussels as easy street for lobbyists compared to Washington DC is likely to continue. A version of this article was published in Ethical Corporation magazine.

 

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