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. to. see any reason. to.

not. see in twenty years now i've been trying to uncover. who are these people who are pulling the strings of the e.u. decisions. and how do they operate. and hoarding to news political or. religious belief. i'd like to speak to police. not that well listen i'd like to to leave a message for the tomorrow i just wanted to come to the meeting. that we have fixed and my name is mr kenny's best i can. the r. and s.

. yes 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 yeah thank you very much. dressed as a small city it's a. city but that's all it is a. 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 dot i think there was the figure is around eighty percent of all it just tastes which. 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 this of large corporations to find industry lobby groups and their lobby operations being you know orchestrated from offices in that area. two thousand five hundred lobby structures. 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 the parliaments the council of ministers. and from the moments that the european commission takes its very first steps in developing new illustration new policies industry wants to be there to influence it's.

i mean in a situation of. 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 more. something for me. and then i just all the business around the open situation.

to be lobbyists. you know we. everybody believe the bad. so we'll make those institutions and institutions in the european union is about the commission the council of ministers and the european parliament but there is also. i know the 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. blubbing 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 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 in the summer of one thousand nine hundred eighty. s. . 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. 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. euro. runs from sweden came up with another of the failed to listen influential lobby group behind this 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 follows a 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. scanning. pier and 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. for the striking similarity. the projects are almost identical. commission seems to have copy paste a deity proposals. to

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thank you. now i'm really curious reshaping europe. meeting in doug. is mentioned forty five c.e.o.'s

all from multinational companies representing billions of euros of turnover. companies like fiat's farce british petroleum. nestlé siemens shell unilever 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 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 as all 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 three 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. and. you are right i finished my job in the commission in april nineteenth one thousand.

and i decided that maybe suppressed place is actually where the money is so i went to the open banking federation. and i started to to be lobbyist. would. be my house worked a. long time nine years in the open banking for duration and i started also to discover an additional word to europe which was. international trade. the elite here everything. is going your read on. what you see you know our industries. yeah i mean if your office we need to have a lot of contacts you probably find the figure of one hundred person which i will

keep in mind. that you hear a very clear 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. slate say a 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 won't 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 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 t. and its influence that time there were no academic studies to show anything about the power of these large multinational companies on the 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 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 he was 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 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. i want 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. that we didn't know when the t.v. stuff would come back. that's on 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 two months from the year to two

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. 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 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 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. 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 better be guaranteed yesterday so as to have the capacity to listen to the c.e.o.'s. there were the and yelling who run fia in italy who three said decker who rammed phillips and another one. 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 were in charge of the european government. 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 read. under fastly tate that's probably a good a good way to put me as a description not being is a little is. understood as a bit of a dirty word but is just networking just contact between human beings.

to make up their will. 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. 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. for 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 your team. of the year t. and the european commission were meeting on a regular basis. not. only was amazingly jovial and informal. all that went on in complete secrecy. and the european commission worked hand in hand. in the nine hundred eighty four

missing links was published and immediately after the european commission set up a working group with the year to be on exactly this topic generated nine hundred eighty. five this is decker c.e.o. philips presents his europe in one thousand nine hundred and his action plan for the single market. ten days later a 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 done to me in india. 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. victims multiply here each day. it's very profitable to invest in colombia with that every

profit out of it is a very high return on investment. you'll know 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 and strategy but just tell the same budrus. high ranking suspects give no comment where you have to say about that mr president. mr president putin. both the media. i won't give an interview i'm sorry but no. investigation is a dead. end it says sick and 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 recruits from goats sic

i've never heard of such a case as ours are so much money and gold has scope for so many years. for all. gold in colombia on our t.v. live live live. live. live. live live . live. live

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