MEP of the week

Corrections & right of reply

This site publishes data about named public officials, so it owes them - and readers - a fast, visible correction process.

Policy

  • Anyone can flag an error: email contact@mepoftheweek.com with the page URL and the issue. MEP offices flagging their own record are answered with priority.
  • Response within 72 hours. If the flag is verified against the official source, the data or wording is corrected in the next daily build.
  • Every substantive correction is logged below, dated, with what changed. Silent corrections are not made.
  • Right of reply: an MEP named on this site may request a short factual clarification be attached to their page while a dispute is reviewed.

Corrections log

  • 13 October 2026 - edited declarations announced as deleted. Each Monday this site freezes its record and compares it with the previous week's. On 12 October 2026 that comparison counted every record the new freeze no longer held as removed, and every record it added as new. From that day's build until this correction the homepage said "251 entries vanished" - "declared, then deleted" - and the edit log on the data page said "251 past declarations removed or altered" and counted 3,833 new records. No declaration had been deleted: the 251 were the replaced versions of edited declarations that this site has left out since 8 October 2026 (see that entry), and of the 3,833 records, 524 were new, 3,307 had been found late and 2 were edited versions. Each record a weekly freeze adds or loses is now put down to its cause, and the comparison of 12 October has been redone that way. The same change stops the homepage's Momentum finding setting the latest quarter's declared meetings against the quarter before ("Declarations down 62%", the third quarter of 2026 against the second), where the summer recess and declarations not yet published looked like a trend: a quarter is now compared only with the same quarter a year earlier, once it ended at least 90 days before.
  • 8 October 2026 - edited declarations counted once. The Parliament edits declarations it has published: it renames counterparts and rewords titles. Until 7 October 2026 this site read such an edit as a new declaration and kept the one it already held, so the meeting's counterpart counted twice in totals, rankings and labels: Ştefan Muşoiu's meetings of 15 and 16 September 2026 with Tyres Europe, Tesla and FuelsEurope, retitled "Meeting on IAA", each counted twice. Reads of members' whole lists on the Parliament's website show which version it no longer lists: 250 counterpart entries of 183 members have been left out so far, and each of those declarations counts once, under the version this site read later, from the day it first read the declaration. An edit read as a new declaration from now on is settled when the member's whole list is next read, at least once every two weeks. The methodology gives the rule.
  • 7 October 2026 - 3,902 declared meetings up to April 2025 added. For meetings on or before 29 April 2025, the last day of the older bulk feed (Transparency International's Integrity Watch EU), this site showed only that feed's record and left out the declarations it had collected itself for those meetings, on the assumption that the feed held them all. It does not: it holds nothing at all for some members, and for many others its record ends weeks or months before that day. So 4,385 counterpart entries this site had collected were not shown - an entry is one organisation named at one meeting - among them 3,902 declared meetings the feed lacks entirely: 1,395 in April 2025, 1,011 in March, 545 in February and 338 in January, and 613 earlier, back to March 2023. They are now added wherever the feed lacks them; a declaration the feed holds - the same member and day with the same organisation or title, or one the Parliament has since edited - is still shown once, as the feed recorded it. They count like any other declaration in totals, rankings and labels, but in no publication week, so no MEP of the week changes. The methodology gives the rule.
  • 7 October 2026 - wrong Register matches removed. When a member names an organisation without its Register ID, this site looks the name up in the Register. Where that rested on an acronym alone, some meetings went to the wrong organisation's page: "ESMA", the EU's securities regulator, to a printing association; "UBA", Germany's environment agency, to the Ukrainian Bar Association; the International Monetary Fund to a media foundation; "COI", a French state advisory council, to a Portuguese NGO; "MSF" to the Michael Succow Stiftung rather than Médecins Sans Frontières. Fabienne Keller's profile listed Fundação COI among the organisations she meets most; those entries were her hearings of the French council. The acronym of an EU institution or agency, a national authority or an international organisation is no longer matched to a registrant unless the member writes out that registrant's own name beside it, a short acronym needs a second piece of evidence, and a name written out beside an acronym must agree with the Register's name unless the member has linked that organisation on another entry; the cases these rules cannot see are corrected by hand. That second piece of evidence must now be the writer's own - the member who wrote the entry linked that organisation on another entry, or sits for the country of its head office - and not another member's: Cynthia Ní Mhurchú's two "RTE" entries of April 2025 were on the profile of RTE, the French electricity grid operator, and Marianne Vind's two "BAT" entries, one of them on asbestos, on British American Tobacco's, because other members' "RTE" and "BAT" were those registrants. A Register name that goes on past the name a member wrote now matches only when the rest is a legal form, an office or a gloss, and one that adds a country only for members who sit for that country: Germany's environment agency, written out as "Umweltbundesamt", had gone to Austria's (15 entries, all from German members), and "Dansk Industri", the Confederation of Danish Industry, to its defence and security branch (24 entries). A "European" or an "International" that the Register's name lacks now counts against a match: "Plan International" had gone to Plan A, a company, and the International Institute for Asian Studies to the European Institute for Asian Studies. The profiles of Fundação COI, DNB Bank ASA, the European Specialist Printing Manufacturers Association, the Ukrainian Bar Association, Dansk Industri Forsvar og sikkerhed, the Federation for Hunting & Conservation - Malta, the Semiconductor Industry Association in the U.S., Terre des Hommes Netherlands, the European Institute for Asian Studies and Plan A, which rested on such matches, have been withdrawn. "The sloppy" counts a name of three letters or fewer only when the member's own record backs it, or a reviewer has checked that spelling.
  • 7 October 2026 - one type for each organisation. An organisation's type - company, business group, trade union, NGO and so on - is now decided once for its Register ID, and its page, the sector tables, the chart of counterpart types and the business share all use the same one. The chart had counted the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, Eurocadres and the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights as diplomatic bodies because of words in their names, while their pages gave their Register type. Reviewers placed the most-met organisations the Register files only under its catch-all, “Other” - among them Austria's and Germany's chambers of commerce, public broadcasters, state development banks and party foundations - and FIFA, UEFA, the European Broadcasting Union and European Coordination Via Campesina, which the Register files with trade unions and professional bodies, are no longer counted as business groups. An organisation no reviewer has placed yet is shown as Other, the Register's word, and left out of the chart's types.
  • 7 October 2026 - what reading after a stop recovers. The methodology said that the first days of reading after a stop in collection pick up the declarations published during it. They picked up only those among each member's ten most recent meetings: each read from 6 September 2026 took only that part of a member's list, so a declaration published during the stop of 24 July - 5 September 2026 for an older meeting was not collected. A check on 29 September 2026 of twelve members whose newest declarations were all or nearly all new when reading resumed found 442 declarations on the Parliament's website, published after this site's full read of their lists in mid-July 2026, that this site had not collected. Each member's whole list is now also read, at least once every two weeks, which picks up declarations like these as the reads reach them; they count in every total but, since the week they were published cannot be known, in no publication week, and so never for the MEP of the week. The methodology and the pages for the weeks of that stop now say so.
  • 7 October 2026 - organisations placed in sectors. Until this update the largest "sector" on /sectors/ and /orgs/ was Cross-sector / other: 762 profiled organisations and 5,765 declared meetings, most of them there because the keyword classifier could not place them. A review labelled them, organisation by organisation, each by two reviewers, one from what the organisation is and one from its Register text alone, and kept 708 labels (684 where the two agreed, 24 on a third look); two sectors were added, Construction & real estate and Democracy & civil society, now 141 profiled organisations, 101 of them from Cross-sector / other. A further review on 30 September 2026 placed 12 more of them in a sector; moved 8 labels to the sector of the organisations' peers, among them 4 family-policy groups out of Democracy & civil society; and took 12 organisations out of a sector the keywords had given them against the site's own rules, 11 of them employers' and industry bodies and labour-rights groups out of Labour & trade unions. Cross-sector / other now holds 228 profiled organisations and 2,336 declared meetings: 167 placed there by a reviewer and 61 the classifier could not place. Every sector's figures on /sectors/ and /orgs/ moved with these changes; the methodology says how each label is made.
  • 7 October 2026 - "the sloppy" label redefined. The label was meant for members who leave out the Register ID of organisations that are in the Register. Its old test took its second share over the entries a member had left unlinked, so it fell mostly on members who linked a lot. On the data of this build the old test would label 200 members, 130 of whom link a larger share of their entries than the Parliament-wide 52% their profiles are compared with; the new rule labels 17. René Repasi, for one, carried it: he leaves out the Register ID in 26 of the 268 entries in which he names an organisation that is in the Register (10%), against 15% across the Parliament. The label now counts, of the entries where a member names an organisation that is in the Register, the share without its ID, and applies from 40% (more than twice the Parliament's rate of 15%), on at least 10 such entries and 5 left out. No member with the label links a larger share of their entries than the Parliament-wide 52%. The methodology gives the rule and each labelled profile its numbers.
  • 29 September 2026 - three weekly editions withdrawn. The pages for 31 August - 6 September, 7-13 September and 21-27 September 2026 (/week/2026-w36/, /week/2026-w37/ and /week/2026-w39/) named an MEP of the week chosen by the site's older meeting-week formula, for weeks the publication method could not score. The first fell in the stop in this site's collection from 24 July to 5 September 2026 (the European Parliament's website was answering automated requests with an empty page, and this site was slow to notice and work round it); the second began with the catch-up days after that stop, which cannot date a publication; the third was then still in progress, and has since been left unscored because it held a second stop, from 20 to 23 September 2026, when this site's own daily update failed before saving what it read. Since July 2026 only the publication method names an MEP of the week, so the three picks were withdrawn. The pages stay, and say why the week has no edition; the archive and member profiles no longer credit those weeks.
  • 29 September 2026 - two quiz answers. They contradicted the site's own figures: the organisation that met the most MEPs is Meta, not Google; and it is the Greens and The Left, not the sovereigntist right, that meet NGOs most - Europe of Sovereign Nations meets diplomatic and government counterparts most. Quiz facts are now computed from the same data as the pages that show them.