Ah, the Corriere and the Lobbies
While the euphoria for the non-discovery of nuclear fusion ends up in the same drawer as the umpteenth new protein that will one day make us defeat cancer, and in the new gene that will cure COVID, the courier ran to defend the lobbies, for the simple reason that it is the newspaper of financiers, that is, of lobbyists.
This happens with an article that gives completely wrong numbers on the extent of the phenomenon. It is true that there are 11,000 registered lobbyists, but the calculation of the river of money is completely wrong.
I would first like to mention two things. The first is that according to the EU itself, the numbers declared by lobbyists are completely underestimated. Which begs the question: what happens to this hidden money?
So the EU itself knows very well that in addition to the money declared, there are undeclared "black" funds that end up in lobbying activities. How this happens, perhaps we are learning from the Qatar speech.
Also because it is difficult to think that funds not declared to the regulator could have legal destinations.
But even in the defense that Gabanelli makes, whole orders of magnitude are wrong. Companies in the IT world have individual lobbying expenditures, running into the millions per company.
I point out that Politico is certainly not accused of communism.
Now, the problem is that those are not the only giants: twitter, IBM, HP, and many others are also in IT and they are giants.
If the expenditure per company is in the millions and the number of lobbyists is in the order of 11,000, as Gabanelli says, the order of magnitude of the phenomenon is in the order of BILLIONS.
And I say this because reasoning as the Corriere says, with a TOTAL expenditure of 1.5 billion euros (which is very small anyway), the average would be 127,000 euros. With which perhaps the lobbyist pays the rent in Beuxelles.
But with champions who officially spend tens of millions, even millions, to have this average, the rest of the companies would practically be giving alms in the churches of Brussels.
This can be easily explained: in the registration of the European lobbies, the effective expenditure is not declared, but the "Minimum Expenditure": the trick, that is, is that Cefic, which spends 12 million euros/year on lobbying activities (with 700 parliamentarians, there are 17 thousand and broken parliamentarians, and we are talking about ONE of the 11,800 lobbyists), in reality he does not spend 12 million, but he spends AT LEAST 12 million.
And Gabanelli also says this:
“minimum expenditure declared”. This information, however, is given in passing, without explaining what it really means, and that is that there is also money "off the counter", which exceeds the minimum spend. As Politico.eu points out in the article I mentioned above.
If only a cooperative financed by voluntary contributions does lobbying for 5 million euros, we cannot count on the fact that on average the others spend little motes.
I'm sorry for Gabanelli, but in a context where there are 11,800 lobbyists and they spend figures in the millions, I expect total expenditure in the order of tens of billions. Otherwise we're talking bullshit.
It must be said that one and a half billion, even if everything were limited to this, out of seven hundred parliamentarians are still two million spent per member of parliament. I would say that it is a respectable expense.
Here, Gabanelli covers herself with ridicule: according to her, this money is spent to have meetings with European parliamentarians. Two million euros/year of meetings?
Where do they hold meetings? What do they eat during these meetings? Counting 200 working days, for each parliamentarian there are ten thousand euros a day of meetings.
Are we kidding ourselves, or what?
It is as if Gabanelli had the figures, she had the data, but she wanted to pretend not to ask herself what they mean. He knows that that is the minimum expenditure declared, but he doesn't ask himself how much is the real one, nor how it is spent.
He knows that just the minimum expense is enormous, but he doesn't seem to care, and attributes it to "meetings". And he doesn't even ask the question, nor does he ask the reader, how 1.5 BILLION euros are spent on "meetings".
in reality, the money is spent on pseudo-scientific "think tank" congresses, which are also attended by many academics and "distinguished scholars", to demonstrate some things to the parliamentarians.
The first is that if they support that battle, some of their relatives could become a "scholar" paid by the think tank. The second thing is the theory of the moment. To corroborate this feeling of scientificity, they often also call representatives of interested companies, or consultancy companies. In this way the parliamentarians come to the conference and remain convinced that they are doing the right thing, and that they can receive bribes in the form of "my cousin is an expert, do you have a place in the Think Tank?" .
When I said I had attended one of these congresses, in reality I was minimizing: under the heading "consulting companies" I participate in several of these congresses together with the company. The most ridiculous was the one against eSIMs. In practice, eSIM became standard under pressure from Apple, which secretly aims to get rid of telcos.
The purpose of the Think Tank was to limit its use "for reasons of public order", since according to the telcos (and Motorola, don't ask me why) the eSIM (or rather, the eUICC chip) should have been confined to industrial world. (for example, the sim that makes the ECall in the car can be provisioned at the destination, in the country where the car is sold. Same for vending machines, precision machines, etc etc).
Apple had fought and for this reason my company was implementing the system for a large telco. Out of fear, the other smaller telcos had created a think tank in which they said that eSIMs were dangerous, benefiting Islamic terrorism.
Obviously that's not true, the eSIM is registered on the network like all others, and its provisioning takes place under the control of two telcos (if we are talking about using it to change operator), and everything is tracked.
But the Think Tank was paid to ask the EU to limit the use of the eUICC to industrial purposes only. Hence the Think Tank conference, with all the experts (people like Orsini, to understand each other) ready to explain to us why it was scientifically proven that we were working for ISIS.
If you wonder where so much false science comes from, well, a lot of it comes from lobbies and related think tanks.
But the organization for Think Tank also does not explain the figure. First of all, it is not that a parliamentarian can or wants to go to a conference (perhaps close to a brothel) every single day. But even so, since ten/twenty parliamentarians participate in a conference, plus the porters (who dream of becoming a paid part of the Think Tank), the number of possible conferences/year is reduced. Moreover, every parliamentarian has his own purpose and his own commission, so invite those from the telecommunications commission for eSIMs, but not those from agriculture. Those have other conferences.
It is absolutely clear that with a MINIMUM amount of money spent of 1.5 billion euros, which is probably several dozen OTC, we are talking about a gigantic ring of corruption.
What's the problem, given that it also happens on a national level?
The problem is that we are no longer in a world where everyone is corrupt and we are all friends. today the EU has quite nasty enemies, like Russia or China. If they get hold of a magistrate in Brussels, and tip him off using their secret services, the magistrate just has to open the box.
Ultimately, that is, the lobby system is a systemic criticality, which allows a hostile nation to literally annihilate the institutions.
It is enough for them to find the ambitious Di Pietro in the situation, and give him the information he needs to destroy any government, or the EU itself.
But Gabanelli's bosses don't care much about this: after all, if the institutions are weak or discredited, the rats will play. And in Italian finance, there are many mice.