it's 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 is a. part of 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 decisions. and how do they operate. and hording to the news political and.

religious belief. i'd like to speak to please. not that now 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 kenny's best i can to his kidney r. and s. . from the 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 the phones i want to that is it ok yeah thank you very much.

brussels is a small city it's a kind of provinces but that's on the south. 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 it's just places which are. touching direct life a few open citizens has actually been issued to cheer us. if you look at plus you might beat 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 over to the european parliament and beyond. to finance a good lobbyist for the large corporations to find industry lobby groups and their . lobby operations being in 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 as 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 to parliaments the council of ministers. and from the moments that the european commission takes is for the very first steps in developing new

illustration of new policies industry wants to be there to influence it's. i mean in a situation of good so we 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 more. something for me. and then i discovered. business around the loop institutions. are starting. to be lobbyists. you know we. everybody believe the bad. so we'll 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 when you're to push. 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 until 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 and then the summer of one thousand nine hundred three i remember a fax came in on a fax machine in the office. and it came from the south of france and 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 cleves are 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 the film was an influential lobby group behind this and they asked us you know about the year it's in 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 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 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. of. 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. the proposals.

do hack work and get caught when lobbyists money and lawmakers are combined together that's where the problem of corruption comes from. i don't know the document's. keep up a smart look. there is also. another well behind it which is how to influence the citizens steer clear of provocations don't answer any question. came into the office and found banas around the office and lots of strange faces around and 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 wanted a confrontation possibly they wanted me to ring up the police. have the police come

in through the mount but it 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 in brussels. baseness it's one euro one folds. 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 turn over. companies like fiat's the farce british petroleum. nestlé siemens shell you know 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 a 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 a really 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 this industry leaders.

meet oh 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. this year when. i finished my job in the commission in april nineteenth one thousand. and ninety decided that maybe said best place is actually where the money is so i went to the open banking federation. and i started to you

tube you know pieced. would. be my house worked a. long time nine years in europe and banking for duration and i started also to discover. an additional word to europe which was. international trade. the illegal. everything we're. going 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 a figure of one hundred person which i will keep in my job. to make. sure that you keep up to thirty year commitment. i mean my job i describe it as

a network and as a facilitator as an ambassador and from want to be an ambassador after 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 a chance and then it's going to be up to you to see the upper. 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 to heat 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 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 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. 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 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 sorted. so we decided to which we would be fast and copy as much as possible. in those documents where letters from the year two and two months from the year to two european governments and to the european commission and what the responses. and it really showed the degree of access that the hats and the incredible influence and

it was 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 among 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 where there was an insufficient contact then withdrew their 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. group of industrious which the big air in the city 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. is 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 run. the biggest companies in europe 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 jack the lol they find shuttle is thinking in entirely the same turns so why don't they get together and pull their ideas that's a breakthrough really. i'm fascinated and 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 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. the crazed companies are global days and therefore the american companies the chinese companies the engine companies are 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 that had been sold as a political project. so these letters that we had from the

december point is in a totally different direction. again a master plan behind it's. like with a t m project. written by the year to be. the final showed the year t. and the european commission were meeting on a regular basis. the turn 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 c.e.o. 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 speech about the single market in the european parliament which sounds like the echo of decker speech done to me in india. in june one thousand nine hundred five when your cofield vice president of the commission publishes the famous single market white paper a copy paste of the take. it

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