GPlus, which has offices in London and Paris as well as the Belgian capital, has been "temporarily excluded" from the register for a four-week period for failing to disclose the names of three clients, Valérie Rampi, spokesperson for Administration and Anti-Fraud Commissioner Siim Kallas, told EurActiv.
The consultancy listed the names of 35 clients in its submission to the Commission, including Russian gas giant Gazprom and US IT firm Microsoft. GPlus lists companies, trade associations and civil society organisations among its customers.
But some of its clients did not want to be included in the register. "The list […] excludes the names of three clients who have asked not to be included in the register and one further client, which has registered itself. Each of these clients […] accounts for less than 10% of our relevant revenues," GPlus explained in a note accompanying its submission.
Rampi was keen to stress that the EU executive's decision to exclude the firm from its register, the first such move, "does not represent a sanction and does not imply any wrongdoing on behalf of GPlus". Exclusion from the register is "standard procedure" for when a participant fails to provide "a complete and full list of its clients," she explained.
"The rules must be the same for everyone. Partial compliance is not an option," the Commission spokesperson declared, before adding that two of the three clients in question are no longer represented by GPlus.
The firm responded to its exclusion from the EU executive's register by releasing a statement last week (22 January) indicating its readiness to "actively try to solve this problem with the Commission" and explaining that its entry would be made available on its own website in the meantime.
"When we discovered our entry had been removed we contacted the Commission immediately. The Commission official responsible explained that our entry had been removed because three […] of our clients had not been named. These three clients did not wish to be listed in our registration," GPlus further stated.
"We've been super-transparent," one of the firm's founders, Peter Guilford, told the Financial Times, before warning that the privacy concerns of particular clients may prevent other companies from participating in the register. "I think it's an anomaly that needs ironing out when [the EU executive] reviews [it] in the summer," he said.
Meanwhile, transparency campaigners believe more detailed information on firms' portfolios of clients must be included if the Commission's register is to truly shed light on lobbying in Brussels. "At the moment, finding out what's really going on still requires investigative journalism," according to Greenpeace's Jorgo Riss, speaking on behalf on ALTER-EU.
The Commission is set to review the success of its register in summer 2009, when it will have been in operation for a year.
