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. to the birth of this industry is to lobby industry to. see every person prefer to think of. a. third person sitting in for twenty years now i've been trying to uncover. who are these people who are pulling the strings how do you decisions. and how do they operate. and

hording to the news politically for. her and. her skirt. oh yes good evening. i'd like to speak to a famed please. note that no well listen i'd like to go to leave a message for the 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 european side a cease fire on. this and we have a meeting tomorrow but i didn't get time today to to go things i want to talk to them. is it ok. if you're in labs.

dressed as a small city it's a provinces but that's all it's a. when you know a bit further about it's brussels it's really the place. this is where the business is taking place this is where they just station is dot i think they were the figure is around eighty percent of all its leaves. which are. touching direct life of european citizens has actually been issued to cheer us.

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 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 all the european union. let's listen 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 the parliaments the council of ministers. and from the moments that the european commission takes is from very first steps in developing new illustration on new policies industry wants to be there to influence it's.

i mean in a situation where so many want to have the possibility to go a lot. of the private sector where i would decide myself. what i waited i thought that much more on. something. and then i just all the business around the open situation. i started to. to the 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 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 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 the. or but in 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 and 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 year t. . i went to our archive and i didn't find any. i think.

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 some of the rather interesting and we ordered this reports at the european the round table at corners. i wrote on the request mentioning that 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 resave in europe. may 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. i go through the papers compare them back and forth. for the striking similarity. the projects are almost identical. commission seems to have copy pasted the unity proposals.

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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 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. show mono their girl in a hummer and this a decker. living in the netherlands and you visit 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 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. 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.

an experience that. 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 tribunal beast. i asked worked a. long time nine years in the banking for duration and i started also to discover . an additional work to europe which was. international trade. the illegal. everything. going your book read them. but you know our industries. yeah i mean if you are

lobbyists 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 that you have to really get a commitment. i mean my job i describe it as a network and as a fascinating time 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 to check. it's part of it but most of the time you would provoke a chance and then he's going to be up to you to seize the opportunity. and the

chance that. in december one thousand nine hundred three the ngo 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 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 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 that.

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. 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 and for the rest it was silence. that we didn't know when the t.v. stuff would come back. that's on the table as 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 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 would 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 we found that the start in the early days. from the commission. 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. but i found out the commissioner for industry.

and insufficient then reduce their commission. the economy. the ration rich existed reservation with the fetish is of interest i would say to know for sure that but not at the level of the. sponsors for individual business and i felt that through a missing us 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. who were the and yelling who run fia in italy who three said decker who ran phillips in the know that i. was paid to learn 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 meet. a visionary president of the commission by the lol they find the law is thinking in entirely the same tone. so why don't they get together and pull 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 a little is. understood as a bit of

a dirty word but it's 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 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 that had been sold as a political project. these letters that we had found in december point is in a totally different direction. again a master plan behind it's. like with a t. and projects. written by the year t. . prefer the year t. and the european commission meeting on a regular basis. in. turn was amazingly jovial and informal. 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 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 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 coalfields vice president of the commission publishes the famous single market white paper a copy paste of the decode land. they've

been living this way since the seventeenth century. rituals are strict. their communities are the silicon. the clearly distinguish between their old and the alien. and guard their families and things in the trash.

hold it. hold it. i live. good speech. i wish i. looked. like. a good.

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