Trojan Horse in the European Parliament – Strauss & Partners facilitating access to unregistered business lobbyists

Many of the participants at the events organised by Strauss & Partners, and even some of the co-organisers paying for these events, are not registered in the EU's voluntary Transparency Register for lobbyists. Yet the events organised by Strauss & Partners enable companies and lobby groups to access MEPs and other high-level decision-makers, despite not being registered.

The European Parliament, currently looking for ways to further restrict access for unregistered lobbyists, should take immediate action to remedy this loophole in the rules.

A closer look at Strauss & Partners

Strauss & Partners is a small consultancy firm, run by Roland Strauss, who is also heading the MEP-industry group Knowledge4Innovation as well as IncubatorEurope, a sort of one-stop-shop offering tailored lobbying and fundraising services. The three organisations are all located in Brussels' lobby hotspot Square de Meus.

According to their website, Strauss & Partners can take care of all aspects of organising events for clients, from ensuring high-level speakers from EU institutions to all logistics and communication. Its website also, until very recently, announced that “we organise breakfast, lunch and dinner debates in the best venues of the European Parliament adapted to the nature and objectives of your event”. Having your event organised at the prestigious European Parliament is appealing to industry and other organisations for various reasons such as the higher likelihood that MEPs will attend and the aura it creates of being well-connected in Brussels.

Some examples of the events their website showcased until recently are a lunch debate organised in cooperation with Facebook, where former MEP Erika Mann, then Managing Director of Facebook's Brussels office, returned to Parliament to lobby her former colleagues. Or a dinner event sponsored by agribusiness lobby group ECPA (the European Crop Protection Association), with the Parliament's “Climate Change, Biodiversity and Sustainable Development” intergroup, while ECPA members such as BASF, Bayer CropScience, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto Europe or Syngenta were lobbying to influence the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform. Or another lunch debate at the Members' Salon of the European Parliament organised in cooperation with the chemical lobby, CEFIC (The European Chemical Industry Council), hosted by MEP Edit Herczog.

All this and a lot of other information was recently removed from the website of Strauss & Partners, almost surely as result of the questions CEO asked about the events the company organises in the Parliament.

Screenshot of Strauss & Partners website taken in March 2015

For instance the text above can no longer be found on its website, and the same goes for three other introductory images and blurbs. Also deleted were the events mentioned above, previously listed as examples of what the consultancy offers. The few remaining events – which are not necessarily the most recent – did not take place at the European Parliament.

The website apparently changed after CEO tried to contact Strauss & Partners several times by email and phone to ask for a list of events organised in the European Parliament during 2014. We also contacted the MEPs hosting two of the events featured in the Strauss & Partners website to see whether the event organisers had paid for the use of the European Parliament and to ask them for a list of events hosted by them and co-organised by Strauss & Partners during 2014.

The two industry events we asked information about were a "high-level roundtable with networking reception on energy issues” organised on 19 March 2014 and the 6th European Innovation Summit, which took place 17-20 November 2014 at the European Parliament, a 4 days program with over 100 speakers which according to its organisers “is a unique chance to meet the newly elected MEPs and learn about their plans for the future of innovation in Europe.”ii

The first event was hosted by former Parliament President Jerzy Buzek, a conservative MEP who is now the chair of the Industry, Research and Energy Committee. It featured then Energy Commissioner Günter Oettinger as a key speaker. The second was also hosted by Buzek together with Lambert van Nistelrooij, another conservative MEP, and counted no less than four commissioners as speakers, in what was their first public appearance in the European Parliament after being appointed commissioneriii.

Both events are still listed on the Knowledge4Innovation (K4I) website, the group which co-organised them together with Strauss & Partnersiv. The lines seem rather blurred between both groups who share not only headquarters and a director (Roland Strauss), but also staff. When CEO phoned Strauss & Partners the phone was answered by someone from K4I (and accredited at the European Parliament under K4I), who can be also contacted on a Strauss & Partners' email address!

Events with unregistered co-organisers

As part of the European Innovation Summit in November 2014 (organised by Strauss & Partners), there was a dinner debate in the Members' Salon of the Parliament. The topic of the debate was the role of gas smart grids in Europe's energy futurev, a priority topic for the European Gas Research Group (GERG), which co-organised the event. Despite actively lobbying for a prominent role for gas in EU energy policy, including EU support for “natural gas-related R&D”vi, GERG, whose members include energy giants such as Shell, E.ON, Eni, RWE, Edison and Statoil, has not joined the Transparency Register.

Screenshot of http://www.knowledge4innovation.eu/gallery/gas-smart-grid-and-its-role-europe%E2%80%99s-energy-future

The dinner debate was hosted by MEP Jerzy Buzek. GERG's president David Salisbury was a speaker, joined by officials from DG Energy. Salisbury was also a speaker (together with then Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger) at the high-level roundtable on energy issues which took place on 19 March 2014, an event partly financed by GERGvii (and featured above).

GERG's president spoke at the same panel as András Siegler, then Director at DG Energy for Research and Innovation. Commissioner Oettinger gave the keynote speech and other high-level officials from the Commission, including Director-General of DG Energy Dominique Ristori, also spoke.viii Such senior officials are now banned from meeting with unregistered groups such as GERG, as of 1 December 2014 in new rules introduced by Commission President Juncker.

There are also other examples in which GERG via Strauss & Partners events has secured access to the Parliament and been offered a privileged speaker position, despite not being in the lobby registerix.

Those dinner debates organised by Strauss & Partners pay off. Referring to yet one more dinner organised by GERG and K4I at the European Parliament, GERG notes that “The event was successful in raising both the technology issues around Power to Gas, and also the need for a partnership involving gas and renewables through the energy transition and beyond.”x The infiltration by the gas industry into renewable energy associations has been a key factor in the EU adopting a non-binding (rather than a binding) renewable target for their 2030 climate and energy goals.xi GERG also acknowledged that “Follow up with DG Energy has already occurred, and GERG has an opportunity to continue to influence thinking in an area which is gaining in profile.”xii

Among the 862 participants listed in the 6th Innovation Summit there are cases of groups and companies which should be registered but are not. According to the Transparency Register, “it covers all activities designed to influence - directly or indirectly - policymaking, policy implementation and decision-making in the EU institutions”xiii. In CEO's view, the following should be registered but are not: Metals pro Climate (a lobby group for the non-ferrous metal industry to lobby on climate and energy issues), Ideas Matter (a group set up by Microsoft, Philips and DSM to promote intellectual property rights), ESIA (the European Semiconductors Industry Association), Platte Consult – a public affairs consultancy, ActoGenix NV – a biopharmaceutical company, Challoch Energy (consultancy on energy issues) or HollandBIO, the Dutch biotech industry group.

Secrecy in the Parliament

It is clear that the events organised by Strauss & Partners and Knowledge4Innovation, hosted by MEPs Buzek and van Nistelrooij, are de facto granting access to the Parliament and high-level decision-makers, to lobbyists and groups who are not in the Transparency Register.

It is not possible to know how many of these events take place. When asked in February 2014 by CEO if they had a list of events organised by third parties, the Parliament responded that there is no such list, and that these events are the responsibility of the organising MEPs. It was to be expected that with the reform of the Transparency Register this situation would have changed. But is not the case, and the Parliament's services replied to a new request by CEO in March 2015 saying “there is no comprehensive list of all events taking place in our premises.”xiv

The Parliament explains that the information is gathered by different services and that “In most cases, the information is not retained longer that the period needed for administrative processing (+/- 2 month).”

MEPs Jerzy Buzek and Lambert van Nistelrooij did not respond to CEO's questions (repeated in several emails and calls) about how many events they hosted in 2014 in the Parliament that were organised by Strauss & Partners or K4I.

The MEPs did respond to the question of whether the organisers had paid for the use of the premises of the Parliament. Assistants to Buzek and van Nistelrooij explained that the organisers of the two events featured in this article did not pay for the use of the Parliament premises.xv They explained that van Nistelrooij and Buzek are chair and vice-chair of K4I: it is an open, independent and non-profit platform; and those events were part of an annual working programme agreed and approved by K4I's governing board.

We believe that the meetings shown here are just the tip of the iceberg and that these kinds of events are a regular way for unregistered lobbyists and groups to enter the Parliament, to gain access to MEPs and other decision-makers, and in the end, to advance their interests without abiding to the minimum of transparency required by the register.

The European Parliament decision of 15 April 2014 on the modification of the Transparency Register, asked the Parliament's Bureau to consider, among other proposals, to “restrict access to European Parliament premises for non-registered organisations or individuals”, to “allow events to be co-organised and/or co-hosted with organisations or individuals falling within the scope of the Transparency Register only if those organisations or individuals are registered”, and to “withhold European Parliament's patronage of any event organised by an organisation falling within the scope of the Transparency Register to cases where such an organisation is registered”. Regrettably the Parliament's Bureau is still discussing how to implement those measures, rather than taking the speedy action required.

Clearly it has some work to do looking at the regular events organised by Strauss & Partners, K4I and similar firms. As a first step it could follow recommendations from ALTER-EU and the Full lobby transparency now! campaign to improve the registerxvi. Among the first-step measures they propose – while demanding a legally-binding register – is “to ban all unregistered lobbyists from hosting events in the Parliament's premises, including those organised on their behalf by third parties such as lobby consultancies”. Unfortunately, there are still far too many undiscerning MEPs who are too willing to co-host these events, and to facilitate access to other MEPs by unregistered lobbyists. Another ALTER-EU proposal is to “ban MEPs, their staff and Parliament staff from attending events and activities organised by unregistered lobbyists.” That would be the end of Strauss & Partners' business, but a step towards a more accountable Parliament.