Lobbying at Permanent Representations of Member States

During 2018, Corporate Europe Observatory and NGO allies submitted freedom of information requests to 19 permanent representations in Brussels to obtain information about the extent of their contacts with lobbyists. This investigation updates data collected by the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU) in 2015-16.

Only two member states both stored and released full data on lobbying: Romania and the Netherlands. Ireland only released the data relating to meetings with their Permanent Representative and Deputy, not lower officials. No other permanent representation released the data requested.

Analysis of the data provided by Romania, the Netherlands, and Ireland indicates that these permanent representations are a major target for corporate lobbyists, although the lack of transparency by others means it is hard to know how representative this picture is for other permanent representations.

The full data is available here. There is a data sheet for each of the three countries and there is a short analysis (in red text) of the data at the end of each dataset.