Lobbying typos and misdemeanors

Did a small Romanian county really spend eight times the amount of Microsoft and Google combined on lobbying Brussels? The Transparency Register says so.

Forget big energy and tech firms. The advocates of social welfare, Romanian local government and Polish broadcasting are the biggest spenders on lobbying in Brussels.

The European Union’s Transparency Register shows the Ford Foundation, a U.S. nonprofit organization, and the Polish public broadcaster Telewizja Polska S.A. dropped a whopping $1 billion on influencing the EU in 2014.

Right behind them is Manchester’s University of Salford at €120 million, Hungary’s Eötvös Loránd University at €94 million and the Timiş local city council in Romania at €81 million — dwarfing the paltry €8 million spent by Microsoft and Google.

There’s just one problem. None of the figures are accurate.

The erroneous totals, taken directly from the EU’s official lobbying database, confirm what transparency experts have long argued: The register is so laden with mistakes and confused entries that it is unreliable and often misleading.

“The poor quality of the data on the register is a real problem,” said Daniel Freund of Transparency International, a campaign group. “One third of the entries are inaccurate to say the least; some are outright meaningless. It is crazy stuff.”

POLITICO discovered the faulty data through a new online platform launched last week by Transparency International, which allows the public to compare lobbying data for the first time from across multiple unconnected sites. A search of the top spenders turned up the unexpected — and ultimately, incorrect — results.

Participation in the EU Transparency Register is purely voluntary, but the European Commission decided in December 2014 that anyone who wants to meet commissioners and top public officials must register first, regardless of whether they are lobbyists. That requirement means many of the 7,935 entries — including those who appear to be the top lobbying spenders — not worth the virtual page they are written on.

The problem is also an issue of manpower and mandate. Only four part-time officials monitor the thousands of pages of documents. The institutions in charge of the official register, the European Parliament and the Commission, aren’t required to investigate the reliability of much of the information entered in the online database. And because the Register is not legally enforceable, inaccurate entries attract no penalty.

Timiş council official Agneta Kardos expressed dismay, but not surprise, when told that her employer apparently spent €81 million on EU lobbying.

While promising to dig up the correct figure, Kardos said it was a “plain human error on my [part]” and that she suspected something may have gone wrong when entering the information.

The form itself was not complicated, Kardos said. The problem was that there was no way of finding out what information would be required before starting the process.

“All the information [was] not available to me personally,” said Kardos, who works for the county in western Romania, close to the Serbian border. “[It needed] to be checked by colleagues at different departments of the city council.”

The Tyndall National Institute, a research center at University College Cork in Ireland, spent €32 million in 2014, according to the database. But Giorgios Fagas, Tyndall’s EU program coordinator, said that was the amount was actually Tyndall’s revenue for that financial year.

Another institution of higher education that suddenly appears to be a power lobbyist was the University of Salford, which claimed to spend €120 million and to have deployed an army of 60 lobbyists with European Parliament accreditation — enough to put serious pressure on the resources of the Mickey Mouse Bar, the power center of the Brussels parliamentary complex.

A senior Salford manager said the entry sounded like a mistake and promised to track down the correct information, but has not yet responded.

Salford has nothing on the Erasmus Student Network (ESN), which claimed to have almost 47,000 lobbyists on its books before quickly revising that figure to just one on Tuesday.

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U.S. organizations appear just as susceptible as their European counterparts to entering figures that strain credibility.

The Ford Foundation, a U.S. charity founded in 1936 by a member of the automobile dynasty, claimed it spent more than €610 million last year. But spokesman Alfred Ironside said the figure is the result of an error because the foundation has never lobbied the EU and never will.

“This is unsettling to us because it is so completely wrong,” Ironside said, noting that the figure refers to the annual budget of the foundation — although the figure is $610 million, not €610 million.

Ironside said a Foundation staff member was invited to attend a Parliamentary conference in March and was later asked to catch up with two Commission officials: then-director general of DG Environment, Karl Friedrich Falkenberg, and Roberto Ridolfi, the director of the DG’s sustainable growth and development directorate.

Ironside said the foundation staff member remembers being handed a form to fill out on his way into the Commission but said it is unclear whether the mistake was made by the staff member or the Commission officials who helped fill out the form.

Another U.S.-based organization that bristled at the prospect of being mistaken for lobbyists is the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a prominent think tank that entered as the amount it spent on lobbying between 2013 and 2014 at €10 million, with 275 lobbyists.

In an email to POLITICO, Andrew Schwartz, CSIS senior vice president of external relations, said the entry was a mistake. “We spend zero on lobbying because we don’t lobby,” Schwartz said. “We have no lobbyists on staff because we don’t lobby.”

Like other organizations, CSIS was required to register in order to be able to meet members of commissioners’ cabinets. The think tank is listed on Commission websites as having had two such meetings in February when, as Schwartz explains, one of its scholars visited the Commission.

The first meeting was with Stefano Manservisi, the head of cabinet of EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, and was described as covering “Relation [sic] with professional association.”

The second was with Miguel Ceballos Barón, the deputy head of cabinet of Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström, under the heading of “Discussion on trade issues in Asia-Pacific.”