About LobbyFacts

Specifically, LobbyFacts.eu can help you to:

• Find up-to-date information on the lobby activities of all organisations in the official EU Transparency Register

• Create a history of lobbying for a particular organisation using information which is no longer publicly available on the official register website

• Filter-out inaccurate lobby data and rank it according to different parameters such as lobby spend or high-level Commission meetings held

• Download searches into user-friendly data files

• Track the rise and fall of the biggest companies, trade associations, or lobby consultancies in terms of their lobby spend and lobbyist numbers

• Search for particular organisations, their hired lobbyists, or lobby consultancy clients to build up a picture of who is lobbying for who

• Find out who has held the most meetings with high-level Commission officials

See our Latest stories to find out how LobbyFacts data is used in media stories and investigations.

LobbyFacts collates information from two official sources. Firstly, data is taken from the EU’s Transparency Register which is the only official source for information on organisations lobbying the EU institutions. The LobbyFacts database also contains historical EU lobby data going back to February 2012 – this is no longer available anywhere else. Secondly, data on the Commission’s high-level lobby meetings (of Commissioners, their Cabinet members and Directors-General) are extracted from the Commission’s website.

As the data on LobbyFacts is a replica of the data from the above-mentioned two official sources, it is therefore subject to all the inaccuracies and flaws that may have occurred in the original sources. Please see our disclaimer.

LobbyFacts is a joint project of Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl. The code base powering the LobbyFacts database was originally conceived and written by Friedrich Lindenberg, subsequently maintained and further developed by Stefan Marsiske, and rewritten and further developed by Vincent Penesich, adding a historical dimension to the database. The code is open source and licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3.0. The website interface to the database, built on the basis of a Drupal 9 CMS, was developed by the Nestor cooperative.

About lobbying

At LobbyFacts, we believe that there needs to be an overhaul of the lobby transparency regime at the EU level.

Lobby transparency reveals an important aspect of how corporate power is wielded in the EU institutions. Lobby transparency reveals the lobby pressures on decision-makers; it can illustrate lobbying imbalances in terms of staff numbers and spending power between private and public interest lobbyists; and it can substantially reduce unethical or unscrupulous lobbying. Lobby transparency is essential, although not sufficient, to expose corporate capture and a prerequisite for public interest decision-making.

In particular, we demand that:

• The current imperfect voluntary EU Register becomes legally-binding, with effective sanctions for those who post inaccurate data; alongside more comprehensive disclosure requirements so that the register data becomes an accurate reflection of lobbying in Brussels

• The Commission extends its proactive transparency regime so that all meetings held with lobbyists, including by lower level officials, are published online

• In order to compare across types of organisation, all registrants should be asked to provide an annual lobby spend. The September 2021 changes to the EU Transparency Register risk confusion as non-commercial organisations now need to provide a total annual budget while other organisations have to provide an annual lobby spend.

Both Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl are members of the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulations (ALTER-EU).