Commission breaks new ground on TTIP tobacco transparency
Hard in Europe | 25 August 2015
Commission breaks new ground on TTIP tobacco transparency
The European Commission has broken new ground in transparency over Big Tobacco lobbying around the ongoing EU-US trade talks.
Well, it admitted there had been at least one meeting with Philip Morris about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – which is progress of a sort.
Responding to an information request by the Corporate Europe Observatory, an NGO, the executive promptly spilled the beans after just five months.
But almost everything in the released documents was comprehensively redacted.
Take a look.
Now Heard in Europe is sure that the Commission’s lawyers have all manner of legal arguments to justify this baffling gesture towards transparency.
Read more about Dalligate and the last Commission’s dicey relationship with Big Tobacco here.
Philip Morris topped a EU lobbying spending table last year, spending more than petrol giant ExxonMobil.
You can see the interchange of correspondence, between the NGO and executive, including legal justification for the black marker bonanza, here.
The Commission regularly reminds us that the TTIP talks are the most transparent trade negotiations in history.
Which leads us to wonder what such documents would have looked like in the past. Something like this perhaps?
No doubt the EU Ombudsman can expect a phone call in the very near future…
