Commission suspends registration by GPlus

On 15 January, the registration of lobby firm GPlus suddenly disappeared from the EC Register of Interest Representatives. That got us curious, and we asked the Commission what happened. Today we received a response: "The registration of GPlus Ltd. has been suspended, as it had not been completed yet."

Gplus's mystery clients

As the registration had been on line since 15 December, the question is what information the Commission considered incomplete.

Luckily, the suspended registration itself can still be found on line. Under "Other (financial) information" we read that GPlus took the liberty of not listing all its clients:

The list above excludes the names of three clients who have asked not to be included in the register and one further client who has itself registered. Each of these clients accounts for less than 10% of our relevant revenues.

This clearly violates the Commission's requirements for registration. The registration form for lobby firms explicitly says that firms "must publish a full list of all customers on behalf of whom you have lobbied EU institutions. If you do not do so, your registration cannot be accepted."

Looks like GPlus tried if they could get away with leaving out the names of three of their clients. We're happy to see that the Commission is monitoring the quality of the data entered into the Register and taking measures when needed.

We asked GPlus for a comment, but so far we have received no reply.