EU Commission lobby register suspends registration for lobbyist GPlus - updated (2x)

The Register of Interest Representatives of the European Commission, which was having a slow start, has now suspended the registration of one lobbyist - GPlus (which was lobbying for Russia during the war with Georgia and on which I have reported before in the case of Peter Witt) - as Brussels Sunshine reports.

The lobbyist failed to report several of its clients, which is against the rules of the voluntary register with which the Commission

"wishes to let citizens know which general or specific interests are influencing the decision-making process of the European Institutions and the resources mobilized to that end."

I agree with LobbyControl (via whom I got aware of this matter) that this is at least a good sign from the side of the Commission that it takes the registration process serious enough not to let lobbyist walk all over its nose. Not more, and not less...

Update:

Yesterday, GPlus has published a statement on their main website:

We uploaded our entry on the European Commission's register on 15 December 2008. Our entry remained publicly available until 15 January 2009. The European Commission then removed our entry. They gave us no advanced notice of this.

When we discovered our entry had been removed we contacted the Commission immediately. The Commision official responsible explained that our entry had been removed because 3 (out of a total of 39) of our clients had not been named.

These 3 clients did not wish to be listed in our registration.

We are actively trying to resolve this problem with the Commission.

In the meantime, our entry on the register will available on our own here.

Let's see, how this matter evolves.


Update 2 (24 January 2009):

One day after this blog article appeared, the Financial Times has covered the issue. Probably co-incidence. In any way, I got a lot of traffic from European law firms and lobby companies, many shortly after the post appeared, and all directly to the page - as if somebody had sent around a mail informing about it...

(Originally posted on 22 January 2009, 8:40 CET)