Nestlé, Yara and Unilever are among the major international companies found to be misleading the EU authorities on their lobbying spending.
The EU’s transparency register has confirmed that they had carried out an in-depth monitoring exercise on the companies and lobbying organisations, after a complaint by Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and LobbyControl.
In February, campaigners alleged that 28 companies or lobbying entities were either under-reporting or over-reporting lobbying budgets in the EU's transparency register.
EU authorities have now confirmed that 17 entities have been forced to update their lobbying spending to the correct amount, 7 have been removed altogether, while 4 confirmed their information was correct, according to a letter seen by The Brussels Times.
Nestlé are believed to have under-reported their annual lobby spend by €850,000. Norwegian chemical company, Yara, were also found to be underreporting by €600,000.
Others included Unilever, FoodDrinkEurope, EuropaBio, European Round Table for Industry, Oracle – most of which underreported by around €100,000 each, according to estimates.
"It's pretty shocking that big companies such as Nestle and Yara have been required to update their lobby register entries by many hundreds of thousands of euros, but do not incur any penalty," said Vicky Cann, Corporate Europe Observatory campaigner.
"After all lobbyists are supposed to provide data which is complete, up to date, accurate and not misleading," she added.
In total, campaigners have estimated that changes worth €47,745,000 to financial declarations in the register have resulted from this complaint. These include €2,450,000 of additions to entries, €23,145,000 of reductions to entries, and €22,150,000 of entries which have been removed.
'Ludicrous'
Among the companies which have been removed from the lobbying register for over-reporting is Charleroi Entreprendre, which supports companies in the Charleroi region and South Hainaut in Belgium.
Campaigners found that the company reported a lobby budget of up to €2,000,000, but found that it had no European Parliament passes, no registered lobbying meetings and smaller lobby budgets before 2021. They also stated that that the purpose of organisation does not fit such a large lobby budget.
Campaigners correctly identified this specific company's ineligibility, which was confirmed this week by the European Commission's transparency register secretariat.
The situation with misreporting in the EU lobby register "remains ludicrous", campaigners say after seven entities identified were removed from the register, while another six made substantial reductions to their declarations.
"We remain puzzled why the register secretariat's checks on new and existing registrations do not immediately pick up on these obvious examples," CEO campaigners added.
For years, campaigners have been calling for a legally-binding EU lobby register. This could lead to real sanctions for companies found to be misreporting. This would likely drive up the quality of the data.
The original complaint was submitted thanks data from the LobbyFacts platform, which is run by CEO and LobbyControl.
