REMOVAL FROM TRANSPARENCY REGISTER

Whether professional consultancies, trade associations, NGOs or academic institutions, the number of stakeholders contained in the voluntary EU Transparency Register has more than doubled over the past 3 years. Any type of organisation that interacts with the EU institutions is invited to sign up and disclose who they are, what they want, who their clients are and what they spend on EU-related activities. Both direct and indirect (communication) activities to influence the formulation or implementation of EU policy and the decision-making processes of the EU institutions must be declared in more detail than previously.  Interest group representatives must sign a code of conduct and in return for their commitment to transparency, can apply for authorisation to access European Parliament premises or to sit on a Commission expert group, among other incentives. All registrants needed to update their data by end April 2015 or face disbarment.

On 28 April a deadline expired for all organisations on the EU Transparency Register to perform an update of their registration. 1,552 organisations on the Register missed the deadline, were suspended and no longer appeared in the public database of the Transparency Register. Said people and organisations were given until the end of May to resubmit and if they missed this second deadline, they would lose their access to the EU institutions.

On April 27, there were 8,496 organizations on the Register. On 23 June, there are 7910. Therefore 586 organisations have been removed from the Register