you better think twice before you tweet because you never know who might be listening. and they don't know has say back here at five. old. technology innovation all the list of elements from around russia we've got the future covered. juggling job. do hack work and get caught when

lobbyists money and lawmakers are combined together that's where the problem of corruption comes from. the document's. keep up a smart look. there is also. another way behind that which is how to influence the institutions to steer clear of provocations don't answer any question. came into the office and found banners hung 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. possibly they want to do a confrontation possibly they wanted me to ring up the police. have the police come in through the mail that didn't seem to be

a good idea to learn the european way with brussels business. in the uk kristie it's one person one fold but in brussels business it's one euro one fault. people don't understand. is they don't understand how it's governed they don't know who are the people who are running it but they know that they were chosen by the people and so when they see the results are less than perfect they say who do we blame and they don't know who to blame because

they don't know who these people are. 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. it. for. this industry is to lobby industry.

when it comes. to. it. not. in twenty years now i've been fighting to uncover. who are these people who are pulling the strings of the e.u. decisions. and how do they operate. and hording to their use politically. and. just before. i like to speak to the police. i thought that

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

you know a bit further about it's brussels is really the place. this is where the this this is taking place this is where they just station this dog i think they were the figure is around eighty percent of all it's just places which are. touching direct life of european citizens is actually initiated here thus. if you look at plus you did 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. who finds a good lobbyist for the 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 are their european union legislation this is complicated it goes through a lot of stages it always starts with the european commission they take. 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 for the very first steps in developing new illustration all new policies industry wants to be there to influence it's.

i mean in a situation of so when you 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. to the lobbyists. you know we. everybody believe the bad. 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 world

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 we are to push from. blabbing 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 are. we'll be what what we call revolving door abusers 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 we 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 and then the summer of one thousand nine hundred eighty 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 they lived in the valley of us a collage of cleave are 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 and 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. and they asked us you know about the iraqi the european round table of industrialists. i don't 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 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. scam link. here in these corridor. i go to the archive. but. the t.m. projects by the commission. i go through the papers compare them back and forth. striking similarity. projects are almost identical. commission seems to have copy

pasted the year two proposals. the worst. white house of the day. never seen anything like this.

now i'm really curious reshaping europe. a meeting in dublin has mentioned forty five zero six zero from multinational companies representing billions of

euros of turnover. companies like fiat's. british petroleum. mislaid. seaman's show you know 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 vis a dick are. 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 a really 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 the synastry there's.

no it was a stunning was that these days free c.e.o.'s words would sit down and actually write. a report that was a detail set of recommendations for how to change the face of europe. and. you are right i finished my job in the commission in april nineteenth nineteen. and i decided that maybe said best place is actually where the money is so i went

to the open banking federation. and i started to learn to be a locust. used to be i have worked a. long time nine years in the banking for duration and i started also to discover . an additional work to europe which was. international trade. believe. anything. thank you. but you know our industries. yeah i mean if you obviously need to have a lot of contacts you probably find a figure of one hundred person which i will keep in mind.

that you have to be very clear a commitment. i mean my job i describe it as a network as a fascinating time as an ambassador and from want to be an ambassador you 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 your opinion. i don't really believe in to. 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 seize the opportunity when the chance is there. in the summer nine hundred ninety three the n.-g. o. network i worked 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 to come its influence at that time there were no academic studies to show to the. 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 t. 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 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 lunch so i took everybody my people out to lunch and left them there. we were surprised by the reaction that we got from the unity 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 and for the rest it was silent. we didn't know when the t.v. stuff would come back. but it's on the tables that were 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 it be fast and copy as much as possible. in those documents where letters from the year two and the months from the year two to european governments and to european commission and i would responses. and it really showed the degree of access that they had an incredible influence and it was

clear from those documents. when we tracked back the history of that your team we found that 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 steve. 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. what i've heard out of the commission over in just the insufficient gone in with the commission. the economy grow. richer existed and with the fed. issues of interest

i would say i know for sure that but not at the level of the. sponsors for individual business and i felt that we were missing. and so we decided to set up. a group of industrious rich better be guaranteed yachtie so as to have the capacity to listen to the c.e.o. . there were the and yelling who run the fia in italy booth rissa decker who ran phillips in the know that i. was paid guillen how to 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 would be in charge of the european government. and then when they need. a visionary president of the commission by the role they find dillo is thinking in entirely the same terms so why didn't they get together and pull their ideas that's a breakthrough read. under facilitate that's probably a good a good way to put me as a description not being is the only is. understood as a bit of a dirty word but is just networking just contact between human beings.

and remake of the. it 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 are moving around in brussels talking about. the crazed companies are global. and therefore the american companies the chinese companies the engine companies the taiwanese companies are actually my my allies we're working together for the same purpose which is to open up the market. one thousand nine hundred three was the year when the european union was born. to us and have been sold as a political project. these letters that we had found in

december point is in a totally different direction in the. west are again a master plan behind it's. like with a t. and projects. written by the iraqi. prefer the iraqi and the european commission were meeting on a regular basis. in. turn 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 iraqi on exactly this topic generated nine hundred eighty

. this is decker seal philips presents his europe in one thousand nine hundred and his action plan for the single market. ten days later shocker lorch new president of the european commission speech about the single market in the european parliament which sounds like the echo of decker speech it doesn't mean you need to be. in june one thousand nine hundred five your coal fields vice president of the commission publishes to frame a single market white paper a copy paste of the. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew. i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture.

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