Eva Kaili’s shady tech lobby venture, Poland risks losing billions & what news does the Commission read?
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In this edition:
Eva Kaili’s shady tech lobby venture
Exactly three months before she was arrested in the Qatargate investigation, then-European Parliament Vice President Eva Kaili set up the Brussels Council, a Belgian non-profit to “create a global network in new technologies”. The plan was for the association to host events, issue political recommendations, campaign and lobby. Companies could join for hefty membership fees of up to 250,000 euros. Politicians would get a free pass.?
Kaili started the Brussels Council with her former assistant, Dimitrios Psarrakis – who told FTM he was the main driver of the project – and with Jacques Bughin, a former partner at consultancy firm McKinsey. But when Qatargate hit, Kaili was quickly removed from the organisation. A clean slate, then? Not quite: Bughin and Psarrakis were also under investigation in other criminal investigations.
Apart from the founders’ background, the objectives of the Brussels Council also raise eyebrows. One of these goals is to allow “the immersion of innovative ecosystems of third countries in those of EU countries.” Bringing in foreign technology is an unusual objective, to say the least, at the end of 2022, when the whole political discourse in Brussels revolves around “strategic autonomy” – reducing our dependence on critical foreign technology.
Read more about our investigation with media partners Le Soir and Knack from Belgium and Reporters United from Greece.
Simon van Dorpe
What news does the Commission read?
If you’ve ever wondered how EU officials keep up with all the Eurosceptic “bendy bananas” stories in the European press, we’ve got the answer. A list that we obtained through a Freedom of Information request reveals the 761 media sources that the Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications uses for its press clippings to “keep the Commission constantly informed and on top of news.”
Wags on Twitter have spotted that right-wing British channel GB News has made it on the list, alongside state-controlled Chinese media and Hungarian pro-government news outlets. But that is likely just a reflection of the Commission’s selection criteria.?
领英推荐
Media are chosen for criteria such as audience share, regional and political diversity. Each EU country must be represented with a minimum number of news outlets on the list, e.g. 43 for Germany or nine for Malta. The list also includes media from a few non-EU countries, namely the United Kingdom, the US, China, Russia and Turkey. Want to see if your favourite media is deemed relevant by EU officials? Check out the full list here.
Alexander Fanta
Dodgy donations, the Italian edition
As we wrote last year, the conservative rightwing party ECR and its foundation New Direction are the champions of convincing companies and private persons to donate to their cause. But some of those funds came from a Czech businessman who used his labyrinth of companies to donate more than what is allowed.?
Our Italian colleagues at L'Espresso wrote the next chapter of this story: ECR received 18,000 euros – exactly the legal limit – from an Italian company called B&K Agency run by Julia Kril, a twenty-year-old Ukrainian living in Italy. She has a close relationship with an American organisation: the Consumer Choice Centre. If they are behind the donations that would be a breach of the rules, as no non-European funding is allowed.?
If you’re thinking: why bother about this because it sounds like that American organisation has the best interests of consumers at heart. Not so much. The Consumer Choice Centre is funded by the tobacco, alcohol, crypto and pharmaceutical industry.
Jesse Pinster
Poland risks losing billions of recovery funds]
With only two years to go, it seems next to impossible for Poland to complete 43 out of 56 investments under the Corona Recovery and Resilience Facility (RFF), an analysis by business consultancy CRIDO shows. A condition to receive the pledged EU money under RFF is for these investments to be completed by August 2026. As many of them are not even in the implementation phase yet, that seems ever more unlikely. The Polish government is currently revising their National Recovery Plan in an attempt to save the pledged funds - a total of 59.8 billion euros, but this process and subsequent review by Brussels could alone take up several months.?
Poland is not the only country that is struggling to adhere to the many conditions for receiving the funds. Our colleague Peter Teffer noted in his recent article that even the Netherlands, which itself advocated for strict rules, is now facing difficulties in providing the necessary information to claim the 4.7 billion euros it was pledged under the NextGenerationEU funds.?
In our Recovery Files, we write about the further cracks the EU recovery fund has so far shown. On Friday, Europe’s Public Prosecutor (EPPO) will publish its annual report, which will shed further light? on the many instances of fraud and corruption within the NextGenerationEU.
Emma du Chatinier