SoftBank government affairs team registers to lobby

SoftBank, which had been using contract lobbyists till now, has added more than a dozen people to its in-house government relations team since last year, Politico reported.

After the Japanese conglomerate hired Ford's top lobbyist Ziad Ojakli as senior vice president and global government affairs officer in August 2018, four have registered to lobby for SoftBank.

The lobby team is being led by Brian Conklin, a former in-house lobbyist for USAA, and deputy assistant to Bush prior to that. Others in the team are:
Alison Jones - A former Ford lobbyist
Tonya Williams - onetime legislative affairs director for former Vice President Joe Biden
Jeffrey Dressler - previously served as a national security adviser to former House Speaker Paul Ryan.

“At Ford, I’d be able to come in the first day and you know where to turn because everything had been established over periods of time. Here, we just kind of came in. It’s brand new. We feel like we’re in our own startup,” Ojakli told The Hill in an interview recently.

The four lobbyists will work on issues that reflect the portfolio investments including technology, financial services, data privacy issues, infrastructure and transportation, autonomous vehicles and T-Mobile’s planned merger with Sprint, according to a disclosure filing.

“I think the company made the right call about having a government affairs presence because there are so many issues that are not only US but worldwide that could really have an impact on the bottom line of any of these investments,” Ojakli was quoted as saying in The Hill interview.

Softbank has spent almost $1.5 million so far on total lobbying expenditures this year. It includes the subtotal for subsidiary Sprint Communications, which accounts for the vast majority of that lobbying at $1.3 million alone. In 2018, Softbank spent just over $3.5 million on lobbying expenditures, up from the nearly $2.5 spent in 2017. Its most expensive lobbying year was 2014, when it spent over $4.2 million, nearly $3 million of which was for Sprint. Sprint unsuccessfully tried to acquire T-Mobile that year.

Silicon Valley's Tax Lobbyist Quits

Meanwile, the tax lobbyist for Silicon Valley - Airbnb, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, the RELX Group, Salesforce, Spotify and Twitter - quit recently. Joshua Odintz of Baker McKenzie deregistered as a lobbyist for all of these companies, according to Politico.

He lobbied for all of them on digital services taxes in the first quarter but reported being paid less than $5,000 by each company, according to disclosure filings.