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people don't understand what the european union is they don't understand how it's governed they don't know who the people who are running it but they know that they were chosen by the people and so. when they see the result so less than perfect they say who do we blame. 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. down to. it. not. in twenty years now i've been fighting to uncover. board these people who are pulling the strings to your 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 calculates kidney r. and s. . from the from the open services for all e.s.f. this and we have a meeting tomorrow but i didn't get time today to to go folks i want to that is it ok. thank you very much.

breast this is a small city it's a common says but that's on this earth. 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 legislation is dogged i think there with the figure is around eighty percent of all it just places which are. touching direct life a few open citizens is actually initiated here thus. if you

look at plus you 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 looking out for the large corporations who find industry lobby groups and their. lovely 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. is bigger. so are there 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 their situations to parliament the council of ministers. and from the moments the european commission takes us from 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 and live. off of 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 loop institutions. are starting. to be lobbyists.

you know we. everybody believe the bad. will make us 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 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 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 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 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 project. 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 the iraqi 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. scam link.

here 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. striking similarity. projects are almost identical. commission seems to have copy paste. the year two proposals. world. science technology innovation all the rest of belem and from around russia we've got the huge earth covered.

by. more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. china operations are all day.

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.

nestlé siemens shell unit lever and many others all of them supporting what is in this book. the authors freeze c.e.o.'s. show more know their girl in a hummer and visit 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 the head of 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 free c.e.o.'s from some of the biggest companies in europe it was a political manifesto written by these industry leaders.

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. you think you're. right i finish 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 an optimist. or at. least. used to 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. international trade. the illegal. anything worth. going your book read on here. 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. you do see a very clear 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 exports and investments. 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 would provoke chants and then he's going to be up to you to see the open. when chatting. in december 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 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 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 meat chain in the morning so i think it was mid

morning i came into the office and found banners high new 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 and have the police come in through the mail but. didn't seem to be a good idea at all indeed finally 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 sea they went off into a room and talked about it apparently and decided to leave. and what 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. and that we didn't know when the tea stuff would come back but it's on 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 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

it was clear from those documents. when we tracked back the history of that your team with phones at the start 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 stevie. 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. and insufficient contact with the commission. the economy grow. richer existed reservation with the fed. issues of interest i would say unofficial

. 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 a group of industrious rich to be guaranteed yachtie so as to have the capacity to listen to the c.e.o. . there were the and yelling who run fia in italy two three said decker who rammed phillips and another i. was paid guillen how to run a 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 were ready to talk about big policy issues

with those people who were in charge of the european government. and then when they need. a visionary president of the commission do lol they find dillo is thinking in entirely the same tone. so why don't they get together and pool their ideas that's a breakthrough read. under fastly tate that's probably a good a good way to put me as a description not being is a always. understood as a bit of a dirty word but is just networking just contact between human beings. with and dreaming 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. 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 which is to open up the market. one thousand nine hundred three was the year when the european union was born. in sold us a political project. of these letters that we had found in december pointed in a totally different direction. again

a master plan behind it. like with the projects. written by the iraqi. referral showed that the iraqi and the european commission were meeting on a regular basis. in the. turn was amazingly jovial and informal. all that went on in complete secrecy. and the european commission worked 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 sheol phillips presents his europe in 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 norco fields vice president of the commission publishes the famous single market white paper a copy paste of the. we

are facing a lot of problem you know. because no one thought to drink no good school. minutes when you feel part. of a local what's not going up up is a law in the local needs you want a community l.n.g. malt will be used. to give general dunford. i was fights about almost fights. all fights. arrived. yet.

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