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The five DGs lobbyists love most

To meet with, that is. Here are the top Commission staffers who have disclosed the most official sit-downs with lobbyists.

It’s a move right out of EU Lobbying for Dummies: If you need to influence a piece of legislation, you set up face-time with the European Commission director-general in charge of the issue.

The Commission’s 32 directors-general have the full skill-set: They are policy wonks with strong political instincts who are in charge of important dossiers, manage large bureaucracies and have the ear of their commissioners.

But these top staffers are not allowed to meet with just anyone. Under new transparency rules introduced by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in December, departmental chiefs have to follow the same rules that commissioners do when it comes to lobbyists: They can meet only with people and organizations listed on the EU Transparency Register.

The new rules also require that directors-general disclose publicly the meetings they have with lobbyists — just as commissioners and their staff must do. It is now possible, by checking the public websites of the various DGs, to see who is meeting with which lobbyists and when.

“I have a better conscience,” said Jos Delbeke, the director-general for climate action, of the new accountability. “We need order in the lobbying business in this town.”

The openness means lobbyists have to consider the strategic value of a sit-down with a top director-general when the disclosure will let everyone in town know about it. This isn’t the case with lower-level civil servants such as heads of unit and desk officers, who can be contacted and met with anonymity.

Some lobbyists in Brussels say they often focus their efforts on these staffers, who may be less powerful but still have some influence on legislation.

But hundreds of Europe’s most influential lobbyists, industry groups and NGOs are still choosing to meet with the EU’s top public servants, despite the new scrutiny. And the list of encounters is growing every day.

Here, we look at five influential directors-general who are taking the most meetings with lobbyists, according to their websites. The list is ranked in order of most lobbyists met since December 1, 2014.

1: ROBERT MADELIN — DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology

With 51 meetings with external stakeholders logged since the new transparency measures were adopted on December 1, 2014, Robert Madelin is the most popular director-general in Brussels.

This is hardly surprising. The 58-year-old Briton’s department is responsible for the digital single market strategy, one of the most heavily lobbied legislative packages in the EU’s history.

The directorate also did well in the reshuffling of portfolios that came with the launch of the Juncker Commission last November. He picked up copyright reforms, online services and media issues as well as the fight against pirating.

This new suite of responsibilities has led to what Madelin told POLITICO is a “recalibration” on the part of lobbyists — in short, they are taking the opportunity to get to know him.

Madelin added that his popularity has more to do with his desire to be accessible than his portfolio. “My personal approach is that if I am free and in Brussels and there are appropriate interlocutors who want to meet me, then I find time for them,” he said.

That determination to be available may not have served Madelin well last month, when he sat down with Sir Martin Sorrell, the high-profile British businessman who is the CEO of WPP, a multinational advertising and public relations company.

Madelin disclosed meeting Sorrell and two WPP lobbyists on April 21 to discuss the digital single market, even though his guests were not listed on the Transparency Register.

Asked by POLITICO about the encounter, Madelin said it was a “lean-back, what’s the world looking like at this moment” kind of meeting, rather than something relating to the nuts and bolts of policy settings. But Madelin’s office conceded that Sorrell’s failure to sign up to the Register was an oversight.

When contacted by POLITICO, WPP said that “individual WPP operating companies that provide public affairs services are already listed on the EU Transparency Register” but that it would now “register WPP itself.”

2: DOMINIQUE RISTORI — DG Energy

French veteran Eurocrat Dominique Ristori is another of the most accessible directors-general in town, logging 45 meetings with lobbyists since December 1, 2014.

Ristori started working at the Commission in 1978 and joined the energy department in 1996, developing expertise in an area that has become one of the most politically sensitive around, taking in geopolitics and energy security.

Not surprisingly, energy companies and associations top Ristori’s guest-list, with BusinessEurope — which represents energy companies indirectly through its national associations — also getting some of the director-general’s time.

One organization on Ristori’s list of meetings was the American-European Community Association (AECA), which counts among its members a number of prominent energy companies (those listed on the association’s website are also listed separately on the EU’s lobby register).

AECA’s CEO, Erik ter Hark, says such meetings are mainly a chance to invite policymakers to speak at their members’ gatherings, as well as an opportunity to gather information.

“Our members can read about big policy statements in the press,” ter Hark says. “It is the technical details which are of interest” — which is why a meeting with the director-general was seen as the right move.

3: JOÃO AGUIAR MACHADO — DG Mobility and Transport

Not many senior public servants can claim to have met representatives from Rolls-Royce the day after sitting down with a delegation from the European Cyclists’ Federation. Yet that’s what João Aguiar Machado, a Portuguese national, did in April with just two of the 42 groups and lobbyists he has met during the past five months.

A College of Europe graduate, the 56-year-old Aguiar Machado was formerly at the World Trade Organization before joining the Commission’s trade department, where he was deputy director-general from 2008 to 2014.

The main reasons for his popularity with lobbyists in recent months: first, he is new in the job — which inevitably creates a flurry of activity among those who had established links with his predecessor; second, this is a portfolio that covers a wide range of policy areas, from infrastructure to safety regulation.

One of the organizations lobbying the director-general was German vehicle-safety inspection company DEKRA, which met with Aguiar Machado in February. DEKRA is the largest company of its kind in Germany; the third largest in the world. It spent between €500,000 and €600,000 on lobbying in 2016, with seven full-time lobbying positions.

“Firstly, we wanted to introduce ourselves,” said the head of DEKRA’s office in Brussels, Oliver Deiters. “Of course, we do not only talk with the director-general — there are many others.”

As for the specifics of the meeting, Deiters says there were “many issues in the pipeline” for 2016 in the field of driver education, but this was essentially a meet-and-greet. “We wanted to make his acquaintance.”

4: DANIEL CALLEJA CRESPO — DG Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs

Now known as DG GROWTH, this is one of the largest directorates in the Commission because it has aggregated all internal market competences of the institutions. Spaniard Daniel Calleja Crespo has been the director-general since 2012 and is well-known to industry players.

The sprawling portfolio means Calleja Crespo’s 34 meetings with lobbyists covered a wide range of interests. Société Générale had a meeting to discuss the banking sector; Italian electricity company ENEL, which reported spending over €2 million on lobbying in 2014, also met with the director-general on internal market strategy.

Some of the lobbyists who met with the director-general were reluctant to talk — and some only found out that the details had been made public when contacted by POLITICO.

DigitalEurope, representing the digital technology industry and national trade associations, met Calleja Crespo to discuss the “digitalization and interoperability of chargers for mobile electronic devices” — a plan to standardize charges that the Commission has been working on since 2010. DigitalEurope declined a request for comment about the meeting.

Cosmetics Europe, the “personal care association” of Europe, said its February meeting with the director-general was part of its “normal” lobbying efforts in Brussels. “Why do we meet? Simple: we talk to everyone who can help our organization,” said the association’s president, Loïc Armand, a former French public servant who is now president of L’Oréal France.

“I had already met [Crespo] when we were on the same panel at last year’s European Business Summit,” Armand said. “So, it was a constructive meeting. He understands the needs of industry and is trying his best to help.”

Armand added that he has met twice with Crespo’s boss, Commissioner Elżbieta Bieńkowska, at a meeting of French employers in Paris (although there is no mention of the encounters on her website).

5: JOS DELBEKE— DG Climate Action

It’s hard to find a stronger supporter of the new transparency rules than Jos Delbeke, the Belgian director-general of the department responsible for managing the EU’s response to climate change.

Delbeke, who reported having 16 meetings with lobbyists over the past five months, says the new system makes his position much easier to defend.

“In the past, I would meet many lobbyists and sometimes I would get questions about those meetings,” he said. “This kind of suspicion has now largely disappeared.”

Delbeke, who has led the department since it was created in 2010, met with environmental NGOs and industry organizations. For example, he spoke with the Polish Electricity Association in December. He also met with Ford Motor Company, which in 2014 spent between €500,000 and €560,000 on EU lobbying.

“Lobbyists want to meet me for two reasons,” Delbeke says. “For them, it is both a fishing expedition and a chance to plant their story. They want to find out policy details while also explaining what matters to them the most.”

Delbeke also says that outsiders often underestimate how important these meetings can be for the Commission to glean information from the lobbyists. “We see this as an opportunity to press information out of them,” Delbeke says. “We push them for data — hard data. If they are clever, they can still make their point.”

But could Delbeke, like Madelin, run the risk of meeting with unregistered lobbyists? “No,” he says. “My secretary has an instruction to check. If they are not on the register, we do not meet with them.”

 

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