[European] Commission paying for what looks like a gangster protection racket

The EU’s shadow lobbying scandal has just grown more sordid.

By M.E. Synon For Brusselssignal

We have known for some time that the European Commission has been running secret funding to NGOs to push the EU line.

Now German news reports tell us that the EC has gone further. Welt am Sonntag reports that it is paying activists to sue private companies in the courts, in particular to hire lawyers to sue coal power companies in order to heighten “financial and legal risk for the coal plants ownership and operation.”

In the language of the criminal protection rackets, Commission money is being used to put the frighteners on private companies.

Christoph de Vries, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior in the German Government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, said: “It is an outrageous act when parts of the EU Commission use taxpayer money to support climate and environmental lobbyists to deliberately harm energy companies and farmers, torpedo EU projects, politically subservient parliamentarians, and influence public opinion.”

Well, yes, Herr de Vries, but there is nothing you can do about it. The Commission does not listen to you.

Nor indeed does the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

As our new columnist David Frost, who was Britain’s chief negotiator for leaving the EU, notes, a May 22 statement signed by nine European prime ministers asking for a renegotiation of the European Convention on Human Rights is causing some irritation among the unelected European legal elite.

The prime ministers want the convention re-tuned so that the ECHR cannot use it as an ever-increasing cover for immigrant and asylum seekers to gain residence in European countries.

The reply by Alain Berset, Secretary General of the Council of Europe, was icy. He felt the statement “wasn’t healthy.”

As the diplomat Frost interprets that, Berset is saying: “Best if you don’t talk; but if you must talk, we won’t listen.”

Finally, at least ten people have died at a school shooting at an Austrian school, with 28 injured.

The suspected shooter was a 22-year-old ex-pupil, who was later found dead.

Austria is an ancient Catholic country, whose people have an ancient Latin saying:

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

M.E. Synon