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. a good part of this industry is to lobby industry. to. see any reason prefer to think of. a. certain period in twenty years now i've been trying to uncover. who are these people who are pulling the strings of the new decisions. and how do they operate. and hording to the huge political elite.

her. skirts are. just before. i'd like to speak to the police. i thought that no well listen i'd like to to leave a message for tomorrow i just wanted to come to the meeting. that we have fixed. my name is mr kenny's best calculates kidney are and this and this from from the european side it's just. this and we have a meeting tomorrow but i didn't get time today to to go to things i want to know. is it ok yeah. thank you very much.

dressers is a small city it's a kind of province's but that's on the side. when you know a bit further about it's brussels is really the place. this is where this is taking place this is where legislation is dot i think the figure is around eighty percent of all its leaves. which are. touching direct life of european citizens is actually initiated here thus.

if you look at plus you 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. to finance a good lobby headquarters of large corporations and 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 lobby industry in the world only washington d.c. is bigger. so are there european union legislation this is come.

ok this it goes through all of the 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 the european commission takes us from very first steps in developing new illustration on new policies industry wants to be there to influence its.

administrations and i'm going to sell when i have the possibility to go. for the private sector where i would decide myself. what i waited i thought that much more on. something for me. and then i just all the business around the open situation. i started so. to be open is.

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 way 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 them. 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 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 midnight . exists we have 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. and i'll fetch 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 clutch of cleave 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. runs 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 swallows a 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 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 archives. of. the t.n. projects by the commission. if i go for 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.

something extreme cold is the chilling threat of death it's a cooling if you look you can see that the water in my body feels really warm now this is good for you. they plunge into icy water to make themselves stronger you can't get used to the cold but you can tolerate it and you can struggle with. people of snow and ice picks is a frost. these are decent faces of freedom fighter. ready to clean up. that.

salute play free. not. to be treated this way. secret laboratory. was able to build most sophisticated robots. mission to teach creation why it should care about humans. this is why you should care only dot com. now i'm really curious reshaping europe. is mentioned. companies representing billions of euros for. companies like fee. 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 vis a decker. living in the netherlands a new vista decker he was the head of philips one of the largest companies in the country. good enough i was to have a volvo a car producing company. and showman nor was the head of lee honest or very large french ultimately 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.

oh it was a stunning was that these three 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 night. and i decided that maybe said this place is actually where the money is so i went

to the open banking federation. and i started to. to be the biggest. or at. least. used to be i asked 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 elite. if you were. going your book read them. but you know our industries. yeah i mean if you obviously need to have a lot of contacts you probably find a figure of five hundred person which i will keep in mind.

that you hear thirty year. commitment. i mean my job i describe it as a network as the facilitator as an ambassador and from want to be an ambassador and 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 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 seize the opportunity when the chance is there. in the summer nine hundred ninety three pm geo 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 come its influence. that's time there were no academic studies to show 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 unity. 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. 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 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 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. i want we did was using the press lists we faxed the press release to the international media. that

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 that was silent. that we didn't know when the t.v. stuff would come back. that's all 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 would be fast 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 went to responses. and

it really showed the degree of access that they had an incredible influence and it was clear from those documents. so when we tracked back the history of that your team with phones at the start in the early days. from the commission. the the member of the commission who was really keen was among 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 i talked to. but i found out through the commissioner for industry it. was an insufficient call then with the commission. the economy. the ration rich existed reservation with the fetish is of

interest out there 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 yesterday so as to have the capacity to listen to the c.e.o. . the wood and yelling who run the fia in italy two three said decker who rammed phillips in the no that i. was paid given how much who run volvo in sweden people from siemens and the big german chemical companies the french spaniards and 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 would be in charge of the european government. and then when they meet. a visionary president of the commission by the lol they find shuttle is thinking in entirely the same tone. so why don't they get together and pool their ideas that's a breakthrough read. i'm a facilitator that's probably a good a good way to put me as a description not being is it only is. understood as a bit of a dirty word but is just networking just contact between human beings.

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 are moving around in brussels talking about. the crazed companies. and therefore the american companies the chinese companies the indian companies the 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 and have been sold as a political project. so these letters that we had found in

december point is in a totally different direction. again a master plan behind it. like with a t m projects. written by the ear to. the final showed the year t. 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 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 your teeth on exactly this topic generally 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 gives a speech about the single market in the european parliament which sounds like the echo of decker speech down to meet unity business. 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. because powell was the envy of emperor as he had good reason to trust no one. his body was found on the floor of his huge empty house. but did he die of

natural causes. the mystery of stalin's death on its. victims multiply here each day. it's very profitable to invest in colombia with the very profit on it is a very high return on investment. in gold all me and he has said that i've been working in this area for thirty years and i've always had to pay the armed groups at a meeting that is i knew that not a manager is a change their name a strategy but just tell the same budrus. high ranking suspects give no comment where you have to say about that mr president. to president putin. both the media. i won't give an interview i'm sorry but no. investigation is

a dead. end and says the sick can stop your bullshit and keep quiet or else you'll suffer the consequences. even if they're your bodyguards to watch themselves because the same goes for them. blood rivers from gold singe i never heard of such a case as ours were so much money and gold had so many years. for all the gold in colombia.

for. business confidante is sworn in as venezuela's interim president as world leader.