Responsible Public Affairs · Lobbying

The most consequential influence decision may occur before a lobbyist speaks. A new analysis of the EU’s sustainability-law overhaul asks how an invitation list shaped the evidence available to lawmakers—and what the public can actually infer from it.

October 26, 2026 · Research cut-off: October 25, 2026

Executive Summary

On October 21, Transparency International EU published a detailed examination of how the European Commission consulted stakeholders before proposing Omnibus I, its 2025 package to simplify corporate sustainability reporting and due diligence. Its central finding concerns the February 6, 2025 roundtable: of 110 organizations on a list obtained through an access-to-documents request, at least two-thirds represented business interests, 13 described themselves as nongovernmental organizations, and 12 were not registered in the EU Transparency Register at the time. These are the researchers’ classifications of a disclosed participant list, not a judicial determination of improper conduct. [1]

The Commission argues that simplifying overlapping obligations protects competitiveness and smaller firms, and it points to several channels of stakeholder outreach. The European Ombudsman nonetheless found procedural shortcomings in the preparation of this and other urgent proposals, amounting together to maladministration. The issue for executives and public-affairs professionals is precise: how should a legitimate technical consultation be designed, documented and tested when invitations themselves determine whose evidence reaches the room? [2] [3]

The lobbying that happens before the meeting

Public affairs teams usually count meetings, submissions and amendments. Those measures describe visible advocacy after the consultation channel has been chosen. Yet the design of the channel often comes first. A public call lets anyone submit evidence, though participation may be uneven. A targeted workshop can interrogate difficult implementation problems quickly, but its organizer decides who is invited. A “reality check” with technically knowledgeable companies may expose genuine compliance costs. It may also fail to hear the employees, affected communities, investors or smaller suppliers whose experience of the same law is different.

This is an agenda access problem. It has three layers: who can enter the discussion, which questions the organizer asks, and what record outsiders can inspect before a proposal hardens. Even perfect publication of later one-to-one lobbying meetings cannot reconstruct a formative roundtable if its agenda, attendance and minutes were not made public in time.

The European Commission’s own Better Regulation framework recognizes the importance of broad consultation. Article 11 of the Treaty on European Union calls for open, transparent dialogue and broad consultations. The legal requirement does not mean every meeting must be open to everyone; complex legislation needs expert exchange. It does mean that departures from broad, visible engagement deserve a defensible explanation. [4]

What changed this week

The new Transparency International EU report analyzes the February 2025 workshop and public meeting data gathered through October 1, 2026. It says its participant list was obtained in July 2026, about 17 months after the roundtable. The report describes 110 participating organizations, only 12 of the EU’s 27 member states represented by organizations on the list, and 12 organizations absent from the Transparency Register when the event occurred. It further says the invitees were a particularly connected group: although they represented roughly 0.5 percent of registered organizations, they accounted for more than one-tenth of published Commission lobby meetings since the second von der Leyen Commission took office in December 2024. [1]

Those figures should be read with the report’s denominators. “Two-thirds” is a classification of 110 organizations at one roundtable, not a share of all EU lobbying. The meetings comparison uses published meetings in a defined period and may change when meetings are disclosed retroactively. The researchers explicitly excluded general business federations from their count of organizations dedicated to small and medium-sized enterprises, even though such federations can include smaller companies. Their resulting finding—that SME representatives accounted for less than 4 percent of the meetings of specified key officeholders over the studied mandate—is useful evidence about directly identifiable SME voices, not proof that no SME concern was ever conveyed through an umbrella body. [1]

That distinction is the difference between investigating access and declaring capture. The disclosed distribution warrants scrutiny. By itself, it cannot demonstrate that a particular company dictated the legislative text, that officials ignored counter-evidence, or that the eventual policy choices lacked a public-interest rationale.

Three real examples of the access problem

1. The invited roundtable

The Commission presented Omnibus I on February 26, 2025, less than three weeks after the roundtable. It had not run a conventional public consultation specifically on the package. In the Ombudsman inquiry, the Commission cited earlier reporting-burden evidence gathering in 2023, two hybrid stakeholder meetings in 2024, spontaneous submissions and the February 2025 reality check and workshop as its outreach. This is the strongest account of the institutional case: the Commission did seek input and faced pressure to act quickly on compliance burdens. The weakness identified by the Ombudsman was the transparency and breadth of the accelerated process, not a finding that consultation never occurred. [3]

The 2026 report adds the composition of one crucial room. A list of participants cannot establish the content of each contribution, but it can test whether the organizer’s claim of balanced outreach is plausible on its face. The absence of a timely public participant list prevented contemporaneous scrutiny while the proposal was being shaped. [1]

2. The law that emerged

Omnibus I modified the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. The final amending directive was adopted on February 24, 2026, published in the Official Journal on February 26 and entered into force in March. It narrowed the reach of the obligations and removed the separate requirement for companies to adopt a climate transition plan. The Commission presents the changes as a way to reduce administrative burdens, focus obligations on larger companies and preserve competitiveness. Transparency International EU argues that important elements aligned with positions advanced by large corporate interests. Both propositions can be true: policy alignment is observable, while causal influence requires more evidence than similarity alone. [1] [5] [6]

The practical consequence is real regardless of who persuaded whom. Firms that remain in scope must adapt to the amended regime; some firms previously expected to report or conduct due diligence are outside the revised boundaries. Suppliers and investors also need to distinguish an enacted legal change from a lobbying victory claim made after the fact.

3. The Ombudsman’s procedural finding

In November 2025 the European Ombudsman examined the use of urgency in Omnibus I and two other legislative files. She identified shortcomings in consultation, evidence and internal review that, taken together, amounted to maladministration. Her later decision in June 2026 closed the inquiry without further investigation while warning that urgent procedures could become routine if urgency were not clearly defined. The finding addresses procedure; it does not annul the directive or determine which stakeholder’s position was legally correct. [3] [7]

The Commission’s April 2026 communication on a simpler rulebook proposed more flexible tools, including targeted engagement and tiered analysis. The point of contention is whether speed can be paired with timely disclosure of the invitation criteria, participants, questions and evidence. A process can be fast without making its architecture invisible. [8]

A framework for judging consultation quality

Question	What a credible record would show	What this case reveals
Who was eligible?	Published selection criteria reflecting affected interests and relevant expertise.	The participant list surfaced only after an access request, according to TI EU.
What was heard?	A record of evidence, disagreements and unanswered questions.	The public meeting record alone cannot reconstruct every contribution.
Why use urgency?	A documented reason for shortened consultation and analysis.	The Ombudsman found the justification and related procedures deficient.
How was input weighed?	A trace from stakeholder claims to tested assumptions and final choices.	Similarity between requests and law suggests a question for inquiry, not proof of causation.

The framework separates access, evidence and outcome. A skewed invitation list is an access finding. An undocumented assertion about compliance costs is an evidence problem. A narrower legal obligation is an outcome. Analysts should connect those stages only to the extent that the underlying record supports the connection.

What leaders should do now

For a board, the lesson is to ask whether the organization’s advocacy can be defended as a contribution to the evidentiary record, not merely whether its meetings were legal and disclosed. A public-affairs director should know which constituencies were missing from a technical conversation and whether a proposed simplification shifts costs onto suppliers, workers or communities that were absent. A policymaker should be able to explain why particular experts were selected, what contrary evidence they supplied and which claims survived examination.

None of this requires treating business participation as suspect. Companies often hold the implementation data needed to make a rule workable. Nor does the presence of a civil-society group certify balance. What matters is the quality and inspectability of the decision process. When an invitation-only format is justified by urgency, the case for documenting its boundaries becomes stronger, because the public has fewer other opportunities to contest assumptions before a proposal is published.

Conclusion

Omnibus I is now law, and the debate over its substantive merits will continue. This week’s report opens a different line of inquiry: the politics of choosing the room. The evidence establishes an unusually concentrated set of invitees at a formative event, delayed visibility of the participant list, a Commission case for urgent simplification and a formal Ombudsman finding of procedural maladministration. It does not establish a secret bargain or a single causal author of the final directive.

Lobbying integrity is tested at the moment when an institution decides whose knowledge is indispensable. The invitation list is therefore part of the policy record, not an administrative footnote.

Sources and methodology

1. Raphaël Kergueno et al., By Invitation Only: Policy Capture and the EU Omnibus I, Transparency International EU, October 2026; release, October 21, 2026.
2. European Commission, “Commission proposes to cut red tape and simplify business environment,” February 26, 2025.
3. European Ombudsman, Recommendation on compliance with Better Regulation rules in urgent legislative proposals, November 25, 2025.
4. European Commission, Better Regulation, current institutional guidance, consulted October 25, 2026.
5. European Union, Directive (EU) 2026/470, adopted February 24, 2026; Official Journal, February 26, 2026.
6. European Commission, Simplification, current overview and Omnibus I status, consulted October 25, 2026.
7. European Ombudsman, Decision on urgent legislative proposals, June 23, 2026.
8. European Commission, A Simpler, Clearer and Better Enforced EU Rulebook, April 28, 2026.

Methodology. Research closed October 25, 2026. The October 21 TI EU report is a stakeholder analysis based on meeting disclosures, a participant list obtained through an access request and other stated datasets. Its classifications and causal interpretation are attributed to its authors. Official Commission materials establish its rationale and legislative status; Ombudsman documents establish the procedural finding. Meeting totals are bounded by retrieval dates, may be revised retrospectively and do not measure the quality or impact of exchanges. No inference of unlawful conduct is made from contact or policy alignment alone.

Suggested internal links

• Exemption Engineering: How Lobbying Rewrites Rule Scope
• The Tender Is the Policy
• The Frequency Is the Policy

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