European Commission Vice President Dubravka Suica's failure to report on her meetings with lobbyists was not intended to keep those meetings secret, and the omission was very quickly corrected, European Commission spokeswoman Jördis Ferroli said on Friday.

Ferroli made the statement when asked by reporters to comment on a letter from five members of the Greens group calling for Suica to be sanctioned.

The German weekly Der Spiegel recently reported that Suica, vice-president of the European Commission for Democracy and Demography, failed to report at least 19 meetings with lobby groups that took place between 2020 and 2023.

Two of the meetings should have been reported

This prompted five Members of the European Parliament from the Green Group to write to EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen calling on her to penalise Suica. They claimed that Suica had seven meetings with lobbyists who are not registered in the transparency register.

In response to a reporter’s question, spokeswoman Ferroli confirmed that the European Commission had received the letter and would respond in due course.

She said Suica’s office had carried out an analysis and concluded that two of the meetings should have been reported to the Transparency Register, one with representatives of YouTube and the other with the organisation “L’Association européenne pour la démocratie locale”.

Arianna Podestà: Suica’s office immediately corrected the omission

The requests for both meetings came at the last moment and were not published due to a clerical error. It is an unfortunate error on the part of the office, which has been corrected, said Ferroli.

She added that all 19 meetings mentioned were impromptu meetings that took place on the sidelines of other events Suica was attending.

Arianna Podestà, the EU Commission’s deputy spokeswoman, added that Suica’s office had promptly corrected the omission and reported on all meetings, not just those that had to be publicised. She pointed out that there had been no intention to hide anything from the public, as Suica herself had reported on these meetings on social networks.