ALTER-EU's recent report Rescue the Register! How to make EU lobby transparency credible and reliable lists 157 companies and lobby firms that are missing from the EU's Transparency Register, whilst being engaged in EU lobbying activities (in Appendices 1 and 2). 93 companies and groups were also ranked according to their declared lobby expenditure, over one million euros (see Appendix 3, which is based on a third party's data set, as explained in the appendix). Examples from these appendices were used in the main text of the report. ALTER-EU notes that in 5 out of these 250 cases, mistakes occurred, which we have rectified as soon as they were pointed out to us.
Whilst we apologise for these errors, they do in no way undermine any of the conclusions of the report, which calls for a systemic improvement to EU lobbying transparency. To name but a few: the biggest spenders on EU lobbying, according to the register, are in fact not major players or possibly not even lobbying at all. Widespread under-reporting by many large lobbying entities also remains a problem. The entries of many lobby consultancies contain incomplete client lists.
Please see ALTER-EU's Rescue the Register report for more details: http://www.alter-eu.org/sites/default/files/documents/Rescue_the_Registe...