Brussels, 15 December 2025
Transparency International EU (TI EU), alongside nine other civil society organisations, has today submitted a complaint to the European Parliament’s Advisory Committee on MEP Jörgen Warborn’s outside interests. Mr Warborn is the European Parliament’s rapporteur for the EU’s first Omnibus, an accelerated legislative package aimed at simplifying existing EU corporate sustainability and due diligence rules as part of the broader EU’s deregulation agenda.
Simultaneously, Mr Warborn serves as the president of SME Europe, a European People’s Party-affiliated lobbying organisation, registered on the EU’s transparency register, that advances the interests of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). He has, through interventions at plenary debates, appearances at SME Europe events and social media posts, pushed for legislation that would favour SMEs. Despite such a clear conflict-of-interest risk, Mr Warborn has officially denied the presence of such in his parliamentary declarations.
According to the MEP code of conduct, all MEPs must detect, declare, and seek to resolve any conflicts of interest. To our knowledge, Mr Warborn has undertaken none of these requisite steps. This would not only constitute a particularly egregious breach of the code of conduct, further undermining legislation that has already been dubiously fast-tracked, but also demonstrate that Mr Warborn holds the EU’s democratic process in contempt.
Shari Hinds, Policy Officer for EU Political Integrity, said:
“MEPs are elected for one reason: to serve the interests of EU citizens. But the European Parliament’s pitiful ethics rules leave it easy for MEPs to prioritise their private interests with little consequence. It is now up to Parliament to set an example, and properly investigate and sanction what appears to be yet another case of an MEP caught between the public and their own interests.”
The advisory committee must therefore immediately investigate Mr Warborn’s side activity with SME Europe. If it finds a conflict of interest, and thus a breach of the Code of Conduct, it must impose all appropriate sanctions.
But it should never have come to this. MEPs had the chance to ban side activities with organisations registered on the EU’s transparency register at a vote on reforms to Parliament own rules in the aftermath of the so-called Qatargate scandal, the European Parliament’s largest corruption scandal. The fact they voted against such a provision speaks volumes about MEPs’ priorities. It is long time MEPs—and by extension the European Parliament—showed the public they put citizens first, and banned such side activities once and for all.
