Brussels Sunshine

Flemish daily De Tijd, quoting anonymous sources in the Belgian Central Anti-Corruption Agency and the Belgian Federal Court, writes today that an unnamed French lobbying firm active in Brussels has sold confidential information on upcoming tenders for EU contracts to a consortium of Belgian consultancies.

Before the summer break Danish MEP Margrete Auken asked the Commission who the patients’ organisations that it consults with represented. The question was sparked by revelations from the Danish daily Information that some of the biggest pan-European patient organisations are almost entirely dependent on funding from pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Merck.

It's a year ago this week that the Sunday Times reported that a high-level official from the Commission’s trade department had offered to leak commercially sensitive information in return for financial rewards. Undercover reporters from the UK newspaper posing as lobbyists for a Chinese businessman offered the official – Fritz-Harald Wenig – a payment of € 100.000. Wenig was reported to have suggested putting the money in a frozen bank account which he would be able to access after he retired.

Industry lobbying to water down the proposed EU investment fund directive is intensifying week by week. Earlier this year Corporate Europe Observatory showed how the European Commission’s voluntary register in fact revealed very little about the tremendous levels of lobbying by the financial services industry.

A large number of think tanks which receive funding from the EU Commission are boycotting the Commission’s lobby transparency register, as Commissioner Kallas recently highlighted. “I find it surprising that think tanks that receive substantial amounts of Commission funding, including 17 of the top 20 recipients, have not followed our invitation to join,” Kallas commented. “In fact, some of those we support are the least co-operative.

As yet, it is not clear whether the Commission will announce changes to the lobby transparency register before the summer break or wait until September.

On the first anniversary of the European Commission's lobby transparency register, less than one in four Brussels-based lobby groups and firms have signed up. At a press briefing yesterday, however, the Commission hailed the register as "a success" and argued that "the numbers do not point to an instant need to make registration compulsory."

We have in this blog reported extensively about the boycott by Brussels-based think tanks of the transparency register. We have also congratulated Commissioner Kallas for taking on Friends of Europe as a particularly obvious example of a corporate-funded think tank that really must register.