In this article, the twelfth in Allen & Overy’s weekly columns on political law issues designed to help in-house legal and compliance personnel manage risks, we turn to lobbying regulation in the European Union. We touched on this subject in our last article, when we wrote about the rules that govern participation by U.S. companies and their senior employees in the U.K.’s Brexit campaign. Now we examine lobbying across the EU with a wide lens.

For U.S. companies that do business in Europe, Brussels has become the second most important lobbying hub in the world after Washington, D.C. In areas from antitrust to privacy, policy decisions made by the EU bodies that call Brussels home can have far reaching commercial implications. As a result, Brussels has also become a center for lobbying activity, with over 30,000 lobbyists and growing. The increasing size and sophistication of the European lobbying and government affairs industry has prompted a growing movement to regulate this activity through the EU’s Transparency Register. Although the current version of the register is still voluntary in name, recent reforms have made registration a de facto requirement for companies seeking to influence the commission. And with further reforms on the horizon, now is an opportune time for U.S. firms subject to EU regulation to review the compliance framework for their Brussels operations.

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