Part of the point of adopting EU standards wholesale is that many firms will not try to get out of them by bribery or lobbying.

Obeying local laws that the locals wrote themselves is extra work for the corporate machinery - If your officials are corruptible they might get bribed to avoid that workload. If the local law is "EU directive copied" and the corporation is already operating in the EU a whole lot of the time they will just whole-sale recreate the european operation, safety efforts, smoke stack filters and all. "Build a plant just like the one in Cologne, except with more airconditioning" is not a lot of extra work, and doesn't carry the risk of a pr disaster down the road.

The EU has very thoroughly thought-out regulations for.. pretty much everything. Lets assume you are the government of a successful African nation and local buisness people are making noises that they would like to start some chemical factories so that they can turn the output of some local mines into dyes and export those instead of just the raw minerals.

Do you

a: Let them build chemical plants with no regulation whatsoever?

b: Try to find enough local experts to write sensible regulations at the same time your local tycoons are on a hiring spree?

c: Run the EU regs - that have conveniently already been translated into at least 3 of your four official languages - through a copier?

C is a really popular answer.