The review of the EU’s Transparency Register for lobbyists is entering its crucial final phase. The working group on the register review - consisting of Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič and MEPs led by German Christian Democrat Rainer Wieland – is expected to make important decisions in a meeting on November 13th. The current register has several serious shortcomings that need fixing (as documented in an in-depth report by the ALTER-EU coalition in June), which is why ALTER-EU is running an urgent action to demand that the register is overhauled. But perhaps the most important is the continued boycott of the register by law firms that lobby. The credibility of the EU’s lobby register is at stake unless the law firms are forced to register.
In mid-October, the New York Times published one of the most important investigations this year into EU lobbying, exposing important facts about a little-known aspect of corporate lobbying in Brussels: the lobbying by a dozen or more international law firms, many of which are US companies. Eric Lipton and Danny Hakim, award-winning journalists, dug deep into the issues and managed to get law firm lobbyists to talk about their lobby successes. The article highlights lobbying by Hogan Lovells that led to a US semiconductor company being given an exemption to EU environmental law enabling it to continue using a potentially hazardous chemical substance. Lipton and Hakim show how Covington & Burling’s lobbying on behalf of pension funds prevented the introduction of restrictions on pension funds to invest in private equity. The law firm is now lobbying for oil companies like Chevron and Statoil to avoid restrictions on fracking. The article also describes how Baker Botts is gearing up to lobby to help companies weaken EU rules as part of EU-US trade negotiations (TTIP). These are just a few examples.
The article – a must-read for everyone with an interest in how the EU’s decisions are made – shows that large US law firms are active in Brussels lobbying in very much the same way as lobby consultancy firms, but with one significant difference. Whereas the majority of consultancies are registered, law firms continue to boycott the EU’s voluntary lobby transparency register and therefore do not disclose their clients or any other information about their lobbying. Five years after the Commission established the lobby register, virtually none of the law firms with Brussels lobby activities are registered. Law firms continue to claim that they are obliged to provide client confidentiality (something that is true when it comes to defending clients in court cases, but obviously not when it concerns a completely unrelated lucrative side-business that these firms have developed: lobbying).
The boycott by law firms reveals the weakness of the voluntary approach of the EU’s Transparency Register. In the US, where lobby disclosure is a legal obligation, law firms are registered and in fact they dominate the list of biggest spenders in lobbying. Hogan Lovells and Covington & Burling are both in the top-20, with a lobbying turnover of US$9.2 and US$8.7 million respectively in the first three quarters of 2013, as fresh data from the US register shows. In the US, the lobby register was voluntary until 1995, when lawmakers opted for a mandatory register, precisely because law firms continued to refuse to sign up under the voluntary model. The lesson for EU decision-makers should be easy to draw, but unfortunately there is little appetite for making registration mandatory....
