people don't understand what the european union 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 into shadow often in secrecy and very confidential. that. this industry has to lobby industry. when it comes. to get. 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 how reading to the news political and.

religious belief. i'd like to speak to off a please. i thought that well listen i'd like to. to leave a message for for tomorrow i just wanted to confirm the meeting. that we have fixed . my name is mr kenny's best calculates kidney r. and s. . from from the european services for. the s.f. this and we have a meeting tomorrow but i didn't get tired today to to go to phones i want to that is it ok yeah thank you very much.

press this is a small city it's a kind of province's but that's all business of. when you know a bit further about its brussels is really the place. this is where the business is taking place this is where they just station is dot i think there was the figure is around eighty percent of all it's just stations which are. touching direct life of european citizens has actually been initiated here just. if you look at plus human 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. to finance a good lobbyist for the large corporations to find industry lobby groups and there are. luvvie operations being in office traders 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 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 parliament the council of ministers. and from the moments the

european commission takes his very first steps in developing near the station on new policies industry wants to be there to influence it's.

i mean in a situation of going from 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 discovered. business around the youth institutions. are starting. to be lobbyists.

you know we. everybody believe the bad. so we'll make those institutions and the situations 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 when you're 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 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 lobby 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 as. one day in the summer of one thousand nine hundred eighty. s. . and it came from the south of france. from a 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 because you can very important to the area very beautiful area. 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. euros. friends 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 rather interesting and we ordered this reports at the european the round table at quarters. 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 restating your. take the first two publications going through them something strange about them somehow they look so familiar. euro tunnel. scanning. peyronie's 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 copy paste. proposals. british.

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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 girl in a hummer and this is decker. living in the netherlands i knew this a 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 or very large french bottom of the 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 these industry leaders.

meet oh it was a stunning was that these days free c.e.o.'s would would sit down and actually write. a report that was a detail set of recommendations for how to change the face of europe. think you're. right i finished my job in the commission in april nineteenth one thousand. and ninety cited that maybe suppressed place is actually where the money is so i went to the open banking federation. and i started to look to be an o.b. just. used to be my house worked

a. long time nine years and you can bank in for duration and i started also to discover an additional word to europe which was. international trade. the elite here anything worth. knowing your book read them. but you know our industries. yeah i mean if your office we need to have a lot of contacts you probably find a figure of five hundred person which i will keep in my job. to make. sure that you keep. your commitment. i mean my job i describe it as a network as the facilitator 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 two. 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 opera. when chatted. in december one thousand nine hundred 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 t. and its influence that time there were no academic studies to show 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. well we brace talked about what to do and we decided to do something a little provoking. the night before we wrote 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 wanted a confrontation possibly they wanted me to ring up the police have the police come and throw them out that. didn't seem to be a good idea at all indeed finally some reason but we had an office luggage 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 your t. 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 in for 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 it be fast and copy as much as possible. in those documents where letters from the year two and demands from the year to two european governments and to european commission and i went to 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 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. 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 called. the ration 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 rich the big vidyarthi so as to have the capacity of to listen through the c.e.o. . there were the and yelling who ran the fia in italy if we 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 continent. and then when they meet. a visionary president of the commission by the lol

they find dillo is thinking in entirely the same terms 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 just contact between human beings. and we can remake 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. the crazed companies are global. and therefore the american companies the chinese companies the engine companies the time when these 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 that we had found in december pointed in the totally different direction that we're. going to. muster again a master plan behind it's. likely to t.m. projects. written by the your team. the final short 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. and the european commission work hand in hand. and nine hundred eighty four missing links is published and immediately after the european commission set up a working group with the unexpected dystopic generated nine hundred eighty five this is decker seal philips presents his europe one thousand nine hundred and his action plan for the single market. ten days later chuckle or new president of the

european commission gives a speech about the single market in new european parliament which sounds like the echo of decker speech down to me in india. in june one thousand nine hundred five your coal fields vice president of the commission published a famous single market white paper a copy paste of the day could land. plenty

. of. place. i lose it. is based on. you know i care read.

out to sing me just. like i'm on. to the to debate which is a big. thing. would take mass shootings from the. looks of someone coming to stop the bloodshed on this one tom stoppard album is coming is there a concept of the team past. new year's celebrations on the move without the traditional t.v. or festive food surprising meetings and new adventures stories of love and love lost our russians teach foreigners to celebrate them biggest holiday of the year from moscow to st petersburg by train over new year there may be miracles.