BRUlobby

Depends how you rank things. I can recall couple of samples:

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In the late hours couple of MEP assistants are boozed enough to become utterly racist. MEPs as well, but I haven't really hung out with the more extreme crew. Although I have witnessed one collapsing after a fist fight within the parliament, which was curious for sure.

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Some energy intensive industries have lobbied for outrageously environmentally harmful policies. They don't often get them published in their umbrella organisations, who are either more moderate, more realistic, or actually have capable public relations people.

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And not really the worst, but I've witnessed morally very questionable astroturfing and misinformation campaigns, that have been targeting social media users in the EU bubble. Like this gem related to pesticides.

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Some morals I have betrayed for sure. On industry side I did lobby for a cause, which I knew that was environmentally dubious - even if that meant saving jobs and creating well-being for some. I am quite uncomfortable about these issues, as I know many of my colleagues were, but you are doing you job.

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But bribery and other illegal acts would be out of the question. Also, in EU lobbying there is very little exchange of goods or money anycase. There is no doubt, that the action is morally questionable and illegal. So practically speaking, the legality of the action is the main divider.

This makes the practical and moral difference a bit harder in terms of lobbying. You are certainly having influence - and you are having influence because someone is investing in influencing. It that sense, it is using money for creating influence, much like lobbying. So that obviously does create a moral dilemma. On the other hand, stakeholders have always had a place in democratic decision making. They provide expert information at the very best with clear and transparent manner. But this means, that there certainly needs to be rules for it. Uncontrolled, shady and dishonest lobbying is not very different from direct bribery.

much

There has been cases of bribery and clear violations in the European institutions (e.g. Azerbaijani case) hence it would be a lie to say that those won't exist. I haven't encountered similar cases in my own work, but on the other hand I haven't been involved with more sensitive fields, such as foreign policy, which can be vulnerable for those.

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On the other hand, I have had couple of cases, where for example one could expect that MEPs have breached their code of conduct. This would be e.g. not reporting their outside income properly. What is more worrying, is that there have been no punishments for these breaches.

Practical difference is huge. Moral difference more debatable. There was a good ELI5 on this which should sum it up nicely.

95% of the work is rather mundane office tasks. Organising working group and stakeholder meetings, consulting opinions for forming the initial policy stand, organising and participating in meetings for networking, consulting and forming ideas. Plus of course research tasks on producing case studies, collecting data from the field to support your asks for the decision makers.

Then, there's the 5% of events and meetings with the decision makers from the institutions which might have more glamour. This is very regular business relationship usually, with occasional collaboration with your political allies and occasionally providing information for different decision makers on why certain little tweaks in legislation could be better. You can't totally change any opinion, and definitely not legislative macro trends, but small influence is influence enough. I might have some more anecdotal sotries on that later.