this industry has to lobby in history. and they're going to. want to see very. clearly heard the music and are going to check. our top thirty series in twenty years now and confronting to uncover. who are these people who are pulling the strings for the e.u. decisions. and how do they operate. and hoarded into the huge political. herd. herd heard the searchers. oh yes good evening. i like to speak to the famed please. note that no

well listen i'd like to to leave a message for tomorrow i just wanted to confirm the meeting. that we have fixed. my name is mr kennedy's best calculates kidney r. and i s. this from from the european services forum e.s.f. this and we have a meeting tomorrow but i didn't get time today to to go to those i want to. visit ok. thank you very much. this is a small city to kind of provinces but that's all it is a. when

you know a bit further about it's brussels is really the place. this is where the business takes place this is where they just station is. there with the figure is around eighty percent of all its leaves. which are. touching direct life of european citizens is actually initiated here thus. if you look at plus your money the epicenter of political power in europe you see the european commission on the one side next to the council of the e.u. . and all around that's where you find lobby offices most of them belonging to big multinational corporations and you find them also in all of the side streets all over to the european parliament and beyond. to finance a good lobby headquarters of large corporations who find industry lobby groups and

their lobby operations being being orchestrated from offices in that area. two thousand five hundred lobby structures are based in brussels fifteen thousand lobbyists the second biggest blobby industry in the world only washington d.c. is bigger. so all of that european union legislation is as complicated as it goes through a lot of stations it always starts with the european commission they take a new initiatives from the for legislation for policies and then it goes through the institutions the parliament the council of ministers. and from the moments that the european commission takes is very first steps in developing mirrorless lation all new policies industry wants to be there to influence its.

i mean the restrictions i'm going to. bring when i have the possibility to go. for the private sector where i will decide myself. what the way to solve that much more . something for me.

and then i just tell the business around the open situation. i started to. feel ok just. you know we. everybody believe the bad. it's a real makers all the institutions and the situations in the european union is about the commission the council of ministers and the european parliament but that. it's also. another way behind that which is how to influence the

institutions to make a text to give a good idea to. propose amendments to trying to fine tune the tax depending on the interest of the people when you're to push more. lobbying is it was originally envisioned is a good thing no lawmaker can be an expert in all the fields that he or she has to deal with and so they rely on other people giving them advice. but lobbying went from their field of expertise into what is more properly called hired guns so you now have people who may not be an expert in anything they're dealing with but they're paid for by clients who want them to

pursue specific objectives what makes them so effective is many of these hired guns will be what what we call revolving door abusers and these will be people who were in governments then come out of government and are hired by the very same people that had business pending before them when they were in government and the mid ninety's we had come across so many examples of your policies that were basically captured by industry and industry lobbying was felt was really a fundamental problem here the influence of industries is excessive and we decided to set up a group to document examples and to start developing strategies roback this excess of the flow and. that's how it started.

one day in the summer of ninety ninety three i remember a fax came in on a fax machine in the office. and it came from the south of france. from the local environmental group. this group was fighting against a motorway that was planned to go through a valley in the area to live in the valley of us a collage of cleave very important to the area a very beautiful area and. the group asked if we knew more about the role of the european union and and specifically the european commission in this motorway projects. so we started looking into this we discovered that this motorway project was part of something called the trans european networks. the transfer p and that works was the biggest infrastructure projects in history with the estimated budget of four hundred

billion. euro. runs from sweden came up with another detail there was an influential lobby group behind this and they asked us you know about a year to the european round table of industrialists. i know. i started digging for more information about the iraqi. i went to our archive and i didn't find anything. i started diving into the alien world of the business press newspapers like the financial times the economist german business newspapers and we found a reference to a new report that had been published shortly before called reshaping europe. but follows a rather interesting and we alter to this report at the european the round table headquarters. i wrote in the request mentioning as the purpose of research.

i did not believe i would get anything but a few days later a big brown envelope arrived in my letter box. please booklets are inside missing links missing networks and resetting your. take the first two publications going through them something strange about them somehow they look so familiar. you're a tunnel. scan link. here in these corridor. i go to the archives. of. the t.n. projects by the commission. i go through the papers and compare them back and forth. striking similarity. projects are almost identical. mission seems to have copy

paste of the year two proposals. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for like you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture. it's technology innovation all the latest developments from around russia we've got the future of coverage. of. the golden.

mum. let's be. playing. her. i wish i. love. a bomb if flame good luck. just simply get along and i'm. right i'm a little. fifth. he believes. if.

he. gets to. see.

now i'm really curious reshaping europe. a meeting in dublin has mentioned forty five c.e.o.'s all from multinational companies representing billions of euros of turnover. companies like fiat's the farce british petroleum kirkstall nestlé siemens shell unit lever and many others all of them supporting what is in this book. the all source freeze c.e.o.'s. show or more know their girl in a hummer and this a decker. living in the netherlands a new vista decker he was the head of philips one of the largest companies in the country. and i was to have a volvo a car producing company. and showman nor was the head of lee honest as

a very large french automotive national. so the authors of this report were three c.e.o.'s from some of the biggest companies in europe. it was a political manifesto written by his industry leaders. meet oh it was a stunning was that these thieves free c.e.o.'s woods would sit down and actually write. a report that was a detail set of recommendations for how to change the face of europe.

you're. right i finished my job in the commission in april nineteenth one thousand . and ninety cited that may be suppressed place is actually where the money is so i went to the open banking federation. and i started to learn to be open just. used to be my house work took. a long time nine years in the open banking for duration and i started also to discover. an additional work to europe which was. international trade. you know.

anything worth. knowing your book read on. but you know our industries. yeah i mean if you obviously need to have a lot of contacts you probably find the figure of one hundred person which i really keep in mind. that you hear thirty year commitment. i mean my job i describe it as a network as a fascinating time as an ambassador and from want to be an asset i have to know who you have to talk. to i can say that i would present around eighty percent of all services exporters and investors. has a turnover. let's say fifty percent of the g.d.p. of european union. i don't really believe in two. it's

part of it but most of the time you will provoke chants and then he's going to be up to you to see the open. when chatting. in december one thousand nine hundred three the n.-g. o. network i work for had its annual meeting and the meeting was to take place in brussels. we were very impressed by what we had found out about a year t. and its influence that time there were no academic studies to show anything about the power of these large multinational companies on new policies. we decided that this was the perfect opportunity to call for attention on the role of the year to. well we brace talked about what to do and we decided to do something a little provoking. the night before we were at a press release and in the early morning we went to the ear to the office. one of

us rang the doorbell and told the secretary that's here's a student looking for some documents and when the door opened we all ran up the stairs quickly and we all managed to get into the office that way. i remember very well i was at some meat chain in the morning so i think it was mid morning i came into the office and found banners hanging around the office and lots of strange faces around so i said what's what's happening will somebody please tell me what's going on and they said oh we've come to occupy your building and. possibly they want to do a confrontation possibly they wanted me to ring up the police and have the police come in through the mail but. it didn't seem to be a good idea at all indeed finally there was some reason but we had an office

language so i took everybody my people out to lunch and left them there. we were surprised by the reaction that we got from the sea they went off into a room and talked about it apparently and decided to leave. i want we did was using the press lists we faxed the press release to the international media. we expected that's the occupation of this very shadowy able to very powerful business lobby group which really interested media. so things went a little bit differently. i think we talked to one newspaper and there was a radio program that was interested in for the rest it was silent. and that we didn't know when the t.v. stuff would come back for that's all the tables there were a position papers and reports lying around but it was also a very neatly organized archive everything sort it's. so we

decided to move to would be foster and copy as much as possible. in those documents where letters from the year two and two months from the year two to european governments and to the european commission and i would responses. and it really showed the degree of access that they had a new incredible influence and it was clear from those documents. so when we tracked back the history of that year to with phones at the start in the early days. from the commission. the the member of the commission who was really keen was a man called a belgian called c. . t.v. doesn't you know. he had diplomatic business background and he could see the need

he said if i want to talk to european industry who do i talk to. but i found out the commissioner for industry but there was an insufficient contact going to the commission. on the economy called. the ration rich existed reservation with the federations of interest out there i would say unofficial level but not at the level of the. sponsor for individual business and i felt that we were missing. and so we the say the truth set out or group of industrious rich veritably care in the city so as to have the capacity to listen through the c.e.o. . there were the and yelling is who run the

fia in italy two three said decker who rammed phillips and another. pair given how much who run volvo in sweden people from siemens and the big german chemical companies the french spaniards then the british. small number of people who ran. the biggest companies in europe and were ready to talk about big policy issues with those people who were in charge of the european government. and then when they meet. a visionary president of the commission by the long haul they find dillo is thinking in entirely the same turns so why don't they get together and pull their ideas that's the breakthrough really.

that's probably a good a good word to put me as a description not being isn't always. understood as a bit of a dirty word but it's just networking is just a contact between human beings. who make up the world is very small actually as a people we have to reach out actually at the end of the day it's becoming smaller and smaller if you know the right person actually you know it's going to be about a hundred person keep us and the rest. moving around in brussels talking about. it's a crazed companies are global days and therefore the american companies the chinese companies the indian companies you taiwanese companies are actually my my allies we're working together for the same purpose which is to open up the

market. in one thousand nine hundred three was the year when the european union was born. to us and have been sold as a political project. but these letters we had found in december point is in a totally different direction. again a master plan behind it. like with a t m project. written by the your team. the firm showed the year t. and the european commission were meeting on a regular basis. the

tone was amazingly jovial and informal. all that went on in complete secrecy. and the european commission work hand in hand. and nine hundred eighty four missing links was published and immediately after the european commission set up a working group with the year to unexpected this topic generated nine hundred eighty five this is decker c.e.o. philips presents his europe one nine hundred ninety and his action plan for the single market. ten days later chuckle or the new president of the european commission gives a speech about the single market in the european parliament which sounds like the echo of decker speech doesn't mean you need to be. in june one thousand nine hundred five for your coal fields vice president of the commission publishes the famous single market white paper a copy paste of the ticker plan. choose

your language kelly kelly though if they're going to say still cannot. choose to use the consensus yes i can. choose to opinions that invigorating tool. choose to stories get in high school life choose me access to office or.

secret laboratory. able to build. anything mission to teach you. this is why you should care only. the traditional t.v. festive food surprising meetings and new adventures stories of love and love lost our russians teach foreigners to celebrate their biggest holiday of the year. by train over. there may be miracles.

lisa. mullins.