



New evidence has been brought to light by the Corporate Europe Observatory about the unprecedented, beyond doubt, conflicts of interests inside the EU and the occupation of the European Institutions by the lobbyists. A new report proves that the ECB has been literally occupied by private financial institutions and actually impose ECB's destructive policies in the eurozone members.





As described in the report, from 2008, the ECB started undertaking initiatives that went beyond its earlier remit, among them “Participation in the Troika (along with the Commission and the International Monetary Fund) which saw the ECB co-responsible for severe austerity programmes in indebted Eurozone member states, as well as very forceful direct, political intervention in countries such as Ireland, Italy, and Greece.”





Recall that, early this year, the former Greek minister of finance, Yanis Varoufakis, revealed the way that the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, actually sacrificed Greece to save the Franco-German banks . This new report clearly shows why.

As described in the introduction:





It matters how the European Central Bank (ECB) makes its decisions, and it matters who it considers its experts and advisors. Especially if those advisors bear all the traits of lobbyists for the financial sector, and not least when the ECB is becoming a more and more powerful institution. In response to the financial crisis it has seen its mandate and working area increased. Supervision of the biggest banks has been handed over to the ECB, it is taking on a bigger role in setting up rules and procedures for financial markets, it has become co-administrator of debt ridden countries, and a series of asset purchasing programmes have seen it spend trillions to boost the European economy.





Yet an incredible two thirds of the banks and financial entities under ECB supervision hold 346 seats in its own advisory groups, and this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to conflicts of interest between the role of the ECB and those whom it chooses to advise it.





Also:





The ECB groups with private sector participation serve several purposes. They provide platforms to explain the positions of the ECB to big players in the market, as stated by the ECB, but their significance goes far beyond that. That becomes clear when reading the mandates for the groups and the minutes from the meetings. They are about gathering information and exchanging views to ensure decision makers in the institution are well informed ahead of political decisions. They can be “either topic-based or open-ended”, the Chief Compliance and Governance Officer of the ECB wrote to Corporate Europe Observatory. In other words, they can deal with anything related to the mandate and the activities of the ECB, and nowadays that is no small matter.





The report provides the 16 financial companies make it to the top 10 list of those with most seats in ECB advisory groups. Below we see the top of the table:





Rank Name of company No. of seats 1 Euroclear 23 2 Deutsche Bank 18 3 BNP Paribas 17 4 Societé Générale 16 5 UniCredit 15 6 Citi 13 7 Commerzbank 13 8 Clearstream 12 9 Crédit Agricole 11





In April 2012, Euroclear participated in the restructuring of the Greek debt by swapping 41 billion euros of Greek bonds, which represented about a third of the foreigner-held Greek debt.” Note that , “





Beyond that, the Franco-German banking cartel dominates inside the ECB with 87 seats, or 42% of the total top 10 seats.





Full report:



