Exploring the EU Transparency Register

18 March 2012

In all, there are four different roles that an actor - such as an organisation, person or company - can have in the transparency register:

  • They can be registered directly, in one of the six categories.
  • They can be listed as a member organization of one of the registered groups. While some groups actually represent a variety of different organisations, many (especially from Germany, Austria and scandinavian Countries) have also listed a large number of almost identical local chapters or branches.
  • A company or organization can be listed as a client of a professional legal or lobbying company. This is stated as part of the income statement of a representative, giving a monetary range within which the payments are bounded.
  • Individuals can appear both in the two required roles stored in the register as head of the organization and legal representative or as someone with a European Parliament accreditation.

While there are only about 4200 registered representatives in the register, the total count of all mentioned actors is 51268 as of this week.

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