The National Assembly wants more transparency on the role of lobbying. The law passed in 2016 contains a loophole, widely used by interest groups. Jean-Rémi Baudot’s political brief
To fully understand where this breach originated, we have to go back to 2016. At the time, the so-called Sapin II law promised more transparency and the fight against corruption. The text requires in particular the representatives of interests, the so-called “lobbies”, to be listed in the registers of the now famous HATVP, the High Authority for the Transparency of Public Life.
Except that the decree of application of this law will reserve a small surprise. It was written in a hurry, on May 9, 2017, just after the election of Emmanuel Macron and just before the departure of François Hollande from the Élysée. A work “sloppy“, according to a specialist in the file who denounces the ambiguities which turn in favor of the lobbies.
Two examples: companies do not have to declare a contact with the administration if this contact is at the initiative of the administration itself. No declarations either if a lobbyist has less than 10 contacts per year. Private practices have understood this well. It is enough for them to have several lobbyists on the same file to dilute their initiatives and reduce their declarations.
The HATVP denounces a “great hypocrisy”
All of this sounds technical, but you have to keep in mind that it allows lobbies to go under the radar. It has been five years since the High Authority for the Transparency of Public Life alerted the Élysée and Matignon. She published reports. In vain…
Take a company like Dassault. She has very many contacts with the administration and ministries. It’s normal, it supplies planes to the army. But according to the HATVP, it declares almost nothing, because it is solicited more than it solicits. At the HATVP, we talk about a “great hypocrisy“.
How many lobbies slip through the cracks like this? A few months after the corruption scandal in the European Parliament. The worrying question. In an attempt to close this loophole in the law, a transpartisan “flash” parliamentary mission has just been launched in the Assembly. It is chaired by Socialist MP Cécile Untermaier and Renaissance MP Gilles Le Gendre. They have already auditioned a dozen actors in this case.
The complexity is that it is a question of asking the administration to modify a decree that it wrote itself, or rather that it wrote badly. At the Assembly, we walk on eggshells and meanwhile, interest groups continue to maneuver under the radar.