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Welcome to EU Watchdog Radio. My name is Hans Van Schare, media officer at Corporate Europe Observatory.

On Monday, the 25th of May, two NGOs, CEO and global health advocates, published two investigative

reports with a bang.

It made the headlines all over Europe.

Which was in a way kind of strange, because these two reports are about the ways the European Union funds scientific research,

not exactly the most sexy topic in the world.

The reports are about how, in the name of innovation, industry has managed to control the use of

3.6 billion euros in European public research funds. Yep, you've heard that right.

So for the past 12 years, industry lobby groups have controlled the use of billions in

public EU funds for health and climate research through two so-called public-private partnerships, or PPPs,

and this at the expense of the public interest.

The two reports show that these lobby groups have prevented these partnerships

from meaningfully investing into research projects that address the societal challenges,

such as epidemic preparedness, quite telling in times of

widespread COVID-19, or to invest in viable climate solutions. The EU research funds were mostly used

to fund their own commercially profitable research projects instead. These lobbies are now lobbying for these PPPs to be renewed in a comparable form in the next EU budget,

under the so-called EU research program Horizon Europe, which will run from 21 until 27, and all this with the support of the European

Commission's DG Research and Innovation.

Now I will be discussing the content of these two in-depth and damning reports with Martin

Pigeon, researcher and campaigner at CEO, and Marine and Jurian, advocacy manager at Global Health Advocates.

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