when i started out as a young environmental activist i had no idea that i should end up as a watchdog in the brussels machinery. but i was stunned to discover how fragile the political decision making process is and to realize how easily it can be manipulated. there's a dark force behind this machinery an entire industry operating in the shadow often in secrecy and very confidential. letter to. this industry is to lobby industry to. twenty three firms. and i think. you're.

seeing in twenty years now i've been trying to uncover. who are these people who are pulling the strings to your decisions. and how do they operate. and hording to their use politically. or. just leave. i'd like to speak to a failure please. not that no well listen i'd like to to leave a message for the tomorrow i just wanted to confirm the meeting. that we have fixed . my name is mr kenny's best i can escape the r. and b. . yes from the from the european side it's just. yes at this and we have

a meeting tomorrow but i didn't get tired today to to go to those i want to. visit ok yeah thank you very much. press this is a small city it's a kind of provinces but that's on the side. when you know a bit further about it's brussels is really the place. this is where the business is taking place this is where they just station is da i think there was the figure

is around eighty percent of all ages stations which are. touching direct life of europe and 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 you find them also in all of the side streets all over to the european parliament and beyond. who finds a good lobby headquarters of large corporations who find industry lobby groups and their lobby operations being you know 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. has been here. so that european union legislation this is complicated as it goes through a lot of stages it always starts with the european commission they take a new initiatives for the for legislation for policies and then it goes to the institutions the parliaments the council of ministers. and from the moments that the european commission takes is very first steps in developing new illustration of new policies industry wants to be there to influence it's.

i mean in a situation i'm going to. really want to have the possibility to go. for the private sector where i would decide myself. what i went to i thought that that's all. something for me. and then i just all the business around the open situation. started. to be lobbyists.

you know we. everybody believe that. the will make the institutions and institutions in the european union is about the commission the council of ministers and the european parliament but there is also. another well 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 text

depending on the interest of the people when you're to push more. blubbing 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 affective is many of these hired guns will be what what we call revolving door. users and these will be people who were

in governments then come out of government and 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 which felt it 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 a strategy to rollback this excessive influence and that's how it started this. one day in the summer of one thousand nine hundred eighty. and this. and it came from the south of france. from that local environmental group.

this group was fighting against a motorway that was planned to go through a valley in the area they lived in the valley of asp a clutch of cleaver 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. funds 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 be. pm wrong 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 swallows a rather interesting and we ordered this reports at the european the round table at quarters. i wrote on 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 receiving your. i

take the first two publications going through them something strange about them somehow they look so familiar. euro tunnel. scanning. pier in these corridor. i go to the archive. at. the t. and projects by the commission. i go through the papers compare them back and forth. what a striking similarity. the projects are almost identical. commission seems to have copied pasted the unity proposals.

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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 free c.e.o.'s. showroom or no. hummer and this attacker. 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 the head of volvo a car producing company. and showman nor was the head of lee honest as all 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 d.c. industry leaders. it was stunning was that these days free c.e.o.'s boards would sit down and actually write. a report that was a detail set of recommendations for how to change to do good the phase of europe.

the spirits are great i finished my job in the commission in april nineteenth one thousand. and ninety decided that maybe suppressed place is actually where the money is so i went to the open banking federation. and i started to look to below beast. and next. year. would. be i have worked a. long time nine years in the open banking for duration and i started also to discover. an additional work to europe which was its international trade. commission. that interfere with anything.

thank you for freedom. but you see you know our industries. yeah i mean if you are lobbyist you obviously need to have. lot of contacts you probably find a figure of five hundred person which i will keep in my job. to make. to you that you have to be very clear a commitment. i mean my job i describe it as a network as a fascinate a town as an ambassador and from want to be an ambassador 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. as a turnover. let's say fifty percent of the g.d.p. of european union. i don't really believe in to chat. it's part of it but most of the time you will provoke chants and then it's going to be

up to you to see the opportunity when the chances that. 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 at that time there were no academic studies to show to anything about the power of these large multinational companies on the new policies. we decided that this was the perfect opportunity to call for attention on the role of the year to. say. well we brainstorm 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. and 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 meeting. 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 wanted a confrontation possibly they wanted me to ring up the police have the police come and throw them out 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. and what we did was using the is priceless 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 before the rest it was silent. we didn't know when the t.v. stuff would come back. but it's all the tables there were a position papers and reports lying around but it was also all 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 that was it was clear from those documents. so when we tracked back the history of that your team we found that they started in the early ninety's. from the commission. the the member of the commission who was really keen was a man called a belgian called so. 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 where there was an insufficient contact then withdrew the commission. on the economy. the rich existed reservation with the federations of interest out there i would say i don't know for sure that but not at the level of the. sponsor for individual business and i felt that we were missing. and so we decided to set up or group of industrious richard to be guaranteed yesterday so as to have the capacity to listen through the c.e.o. . there were the and yelling who run fia in italy two three said decker who ran philips in the netherlands. was paid

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 right the role they find dillo is thinking in entirely the same turns so why don't they get together and pool their ideas that's a breakthrough really. i'm a fascinating and that's probably a good a good word to put me as

a description you know being isn't always. understood as a bit of a dirty word but it's just networking is just 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. and therefore the american companies the chinese companies the engine 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 it had been sold as a political project. so these letters that we had found in december point is in a totally different direction in the. west or again a master plan behind it. like with a t m projects. written by the your team. prefer the year t. and the european commission were meeting on a regular basis. the tone was amazingly jovial and informal. ever all that went on in complete secrecy.

peter t. 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 unexpected dystopic generated nine hundred eighty five this is decker c.e.o. philips presents his europe one thousand nine hundred 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 down to me and indeed me. in june one thousand nine hundred five your cofield vice president of the commission publishes the famous single market white paper a copy paste of the ticker planned. i

never knew adam lanza person but i was in the same high school as adam he was younger than me just a little bit younger. i always thought he was different i always hear something funny he rarely talks and you don't use a shy kid. i don't know of anyone who is friends with him i also don't know anyone who is particularly mean to know what i do know is that it was very clear that this person was not. like everybody else. can imagine the level of mental illness that would be present to murder

children. americans have so many guns there would be an american and every tree with a gun. for kids growing up in this environment is good for them at an early age to at least see the gun and respect it because they need to know what kind of damage it can do. this is our first task as a society. keeping our children safe. this is how we will be judged.

lisa. mullins.