Five of Malta’s six MEPs have published at least one lobby meeting they held since 2019, according to new data compiled by Transparency International.
The aim of publishing the data is to bring more transparency to lobby meetings held at the European Parliament between June 2019 and July 2022.
During this period, just over half of all MEPs in the parliament used its publication system. The analysis found that 28,344 lobby meetings were published by MEPs on their individual pages on the European Parliament website.
Committee chairs, rapporteurs and shadow rapporteurs are obliged to report their meetings at the latest in advance of the relevant votes in committee and plenary. However, other MEPs are free to publish their meetings at any time and doing so is voluntary.
Malta has six MEPs representing it in the parliament: Cyrus Engerer, Josianne Cutajar, Alfred Sant and Alex Agius Saliba for the Labour Party and Roberta Metsola and David Casa for the Nationalist Party.
One one PL MEP did not publish any meetings
Three of the PL’s four MEPs published their meetings on the EP website. In total, these held 384 meetings during the three-year period, averaging about 96 meetings with lobbyists per MEP.
Since the data was anonymised, the MEP who failed to publish any of their meetings was not named.
Both PN MEPs published at least one meeting and registered a total of 16 meetings between them, according to Transparency International data.
Malta had the sixth-highest percentage of MEPs who published at least one meeting during the period.
At the top of the index stands Luxembourg, with each one of its MEPs publishing at least one meeting, followed by Sweden at 95 per cent and Denmark at 93 per cent.
On the other hand, Greece was the member state with the least number of meetings published, with only 10 per cent of its MEPs publishing at least one, followed by Cyprus at 17 per cent and Latvia at 25 per cent.
Vitor Teixeira, Transparency International EU senior policy officer, said that the findings highlighted two principal issues with transparency in the European Parliament.
More oversight and enforcement needed
“First of all, there is no oversight or enforcement of the rules. The second issue is that there are many other people involved in lobbying who are not covered by any rules, including Accredited Parliamentary Assistants and Political Group Advisors,” he said.
“The European Parliament should want to give the public a clear picture of who is influencing policy decisions. This will increase both institutional integrity and public trust.”
To improve transparency and oversight when it comes to lobbying at the EP, Transparency International recommended that the parliament adequately enforce the rules already in place by introducing effective oversight and imposing penalties on rule-breakers, publish information on lobby meetings in a user-friendly online platform and expand the existing publication rules to also cover lobby meetings with MEPs’ accredited assistants and political group policy advisors.