Report produced by Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and Health Action International (HAI) Europe. Both organisations are stearing committee groups of ALTER-EU.
The report “Divide & Conquer: A look behind the scenes of the EU pharmaceutical industry lobby”, surveyed the entries made by pharmaceutical companies and their representatives in the EU’s lobby Transparency Register to find out how much the industry claimed to spend on lobbying.(1)
According to these findings, civil society organisations active on EU medicines issues, on the other hand, spend a combined €3.4 million per year. With the immense disparity between the affluence of public interest groups and the industrial lobby, it becomes even more difficult to level the policy playing field.
Results from this study show that many pharmaceutical companies lobbying the European Commission on legislation fail to declare their activities to the Register. As registration to the Transparency Register is voluntary, many pharmaceutical companies choose not to declare their expenditures. If recorded properly, expenditure on lobbying activities by the industry could be shown to be as high as €91 million annually, which would be more comparable with the lobby spending declared in the United States (2). The report estimates that 220 lobbyists are active in the EU on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry.(3)
1. The report Divide & Conquer: A look behind the scenes of the EU pharmaceutical industry lobby is available at http://www.alter-eu.org/sites/default/files/documents/28%20March%202012%20DivideConquer.pdf and attached.
2. In the USA the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector reportedly spent about €85,5 million ($115 million USD) on lobbying the American government in 2011. Clear and enforced reporting rules in the US yield a more accurate picture of pharma’s lobby contingent in America as compared to the EU. See: http://keionline.org/node/1321
3. The number of declared lobbyists in the EU compares with nearly 1500 industry lobbyists documented in the US in 2011. This figure includes all interest representatives from the sector (i.e. in-house representatives, lobbyists for industry associations and lobbyists from law firms or pr firms hired be clients) http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient_lobs.php?id=H04&year=2011
