Articles

Germany will shortly take over the EU Council Presidency at a critical time. A new report looks at the German Government’s record in its own EU decision-making and exposes how time and again it is too close to corporate interests.

Journalist and Corporate Europe Observatory board member Jakub Patočka comments on the conflicts of interest scandals of the oligarch-turned-Czech Prime Minister – and explains how an injection of democracy is also needed at the EU level.

EU Watchdog Radio is a new podcast hosted jointly by Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and Counter Balance. In the sixth episode Martin Pigeon, researcher and campaigner at CEO and Marine Ejuryan, EU Advocacy manager at ‘Global Health Advocates’ (GHA) explain the content of two in-depth and damning reports they just published; These reports are about how, in the name of innovation, industrial lobbies have managed to control the use of at least 3.6 billion of euro in European public research funds.

EU research funds for helping people living with HIV in Africa so far appear to have only helped Sanofi’s profits.

Corporate Europe Observatory filed a complaint to the Register regarding the inaccurate, low-ball lobby spending figures declared by both Monsanto and its lobby firm FleishmanHillard. In response the Register’s secretariat has now announced it will present new guidelines to make sure registrants will include their lobbying spending at national level if it concerns EU policy-making. This should generate a far more realistic picture of corporate lobby spending in the EU.

A detailed summary of the findings and conclusions of two extensive reports on research public-private partnerships in the EU: the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) and the Bio-Based Industries (BBI) Joint Undertakings.

BBI is a public-private partnership between lobby groups representing the agribusiness, forestry, biotechnology, chemical, and fossil fuel industries on the one hand, and the European Commission’s DG Research & Innovation, ostensibly to help build a “sustainable low-carbon economy”.

This report asks whether the IMI’s health research truly delivers tangible benefits for citizens, such as better access to health innovations, or whether it is rather focused on enhancing the competitiveness of the largest pharmaceutical corporations.

Regulatory authorities worldwide rely on the certified standard of "Good Laboratory Practice" (GLP) for authorising chemicals. This standard provides for strict documentation requirements and regular internal and external controls. However, the fraud scandal involving a GLP-certified German contract laboratory shows that this trust is unlikely to be justified.