89.

Calls on the Member States to close in particular all the following loopholes when further harmonising national regulations, and to implement a ban on foreign donations: (a) in-kind contributions from foreign actors to political parties, foundations, people who hold public office or elected officials, including financial loans from any legal or physical persons based outside the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA) (except European voters), anonymous donations above a certain threshold, and the lack of spending limits for political campaigns which allows for influence through large donations; political individuals, actors or parties who have been offered and/or accepted a financial or in-kind contribution by a foreign actor must be obliged to report it to the competent authorities and this information should be reported in turn at EU level to allow for EU-wide monitoring; (b) straw donors with domestic citizenship (17): transparency on physical and legal donors must be enforced through conformability statements attesting to the status of the donor and greater enforcement powers given to electoral commissions; donations from within the EU that exceed a certain minimum threshold should be registered in an official and public register and linked to a natural person, and a ceiling should be set for donations from private and legal persons (and subsidies) to political parties; (c) shell companies and domestic subsidiaries of foreign parent companies (18): shell companies should be prohibited and more robust requirements established in order to reveal the origins of funding through parent companies; funding and donations to political parties beyond a certain threshold must be registered in a public and central register with an official name and address that can be linked to an existing person, and Member States should collect that information; calls on the Commission to ensure that authorities in Member States have the right to investigate the origins of funding to verify the information from domestic subsidiaries and to address the lack of sufficient data in national registers, especially in situations in which a network of shell companies is used; (d) non-profit organisations and third parties (19), coordinated by foreign actors and created with a view to influencing electoral processes: more uniform rules and transparency should be considered across the EU for organisations aiming to finance political activities when seeking to directly influence electoral processes such as elections and referendum campaigns; such rules should not prevent non-profit organisations and third parties from receiving funding for issue campaigns; rules ensuring the transparency of funding or donations must also apply to political foundations; (e) online political advertisements are not subject to the rules on TV, radio and print advertising and are usually not regulated at EU level: there is therefore a need to prohibit advertisements bought by actors coming from outside the EU and the EEA and guarantee complete transparency with regard to the purchasing of online political advertisements by actors from within the EU; underlines the need to ensure much greater transparency and democratic accountability as to the use of algorithms; welcomes the announcement of a new legislative proposal on the transparency of sponsored political content by the Commission, as proposed under the European Democracy Action Plan, which should aim to prevent a patchwork of 27 different national bodies of legislations on online political advertising and will guarantee that EU parties are able to campaign online ahead of the European elections while limiting the risk of foreign interference and exploring which of the rules that political parties within single Member States and major social media platforms have voluntarily adopted can be made rules for everyone in the EU; calls on the Member States to update their national political advertising rules, which have not kept pace with the steady evolution towards the digital medium as the primary mode of political communication; calls on the Commission to propose how to democratically define issue-based political advertising to end a situation where private for-profit platforms decide what is issue-based and what is not; (f) monitoring of election spending through independent auditors should be implemented and information on spending and donations made available to independent auditors in a timely manner, mitigating risks such as conflicts of interest and lobbying in relation to political finance; in establishing proactive disclosure, institutions responsible for finance regulations should have a clear mandate, and the ability, resources and legal power to conduct investigations and refer cases for prosecution;