Lobbyists attack lobby watchdog

Brussels PR firms have lodged a complaint with the European Commission that an NGO investigating lobbying malpractice is breaking EU guidelines, reports euobserver.com. The European Public Affairs Consultancies Association (Epaca), the trade body for firms that lobby EU institutions, has accused the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) of breaching the EU's "Code of Conduct for Interest Representatives." The code stipulates that representatives must "Identify themselves by name and by the entity they work for or represent". Epaca says that an employee of CEO, which can be classified as an interest group, “misrepresented himself” in correspondence with lobbying consultancy Burson Marsteller, pretending to be a journalist when he was actually doing detective work. The group, the euobserver.com writes, “was attempting to investigate which firms in Brussels were lobbying on behalf of Sri Lanka, Bulgaria, Botswana and the UK Channel Islands.” Consultancies that work on behalf of governments accused of dubious activities protest they are not engaged in lobbying, but in "country branding."