Welcome back to the podcast of Esna Science and Higher Education Policy.

This is podcast number eight.

And today we are here with Monsieur Martin Pigeon, who is a researcher and campaigner for the NGO Corporate Europe Observatory in Brussels.

When we are focusing on research funding, actually the third biggest EU budget after

agriculture and structural funds, we have a little headache here.

The current European Framework Program for Science, Research and High Education, FP8,

or as it has been named, Horizon 2020, runs since 2014

and ends in 2020. This summer, a commission produced an interim evaluation of Horizon 2020

for the European Parliament. The head of this commission, MEP Soledadreouise Kavison,

criticised that big corporations are grabbing too much of these public research funds.

Monsieur Pugéjean, how is that?

The detail of this comment, I think she is referring to the fact

that the Commission has kept complaining about the needs to introduce a consistent and transparent accounting method to evaluate big companies' contribution.

You might know that in particular in research, public-private partnerships,

this contribution is made in kind, whereas the EU is contributing actual money.

Basically, for example, if you take the EME, the Innovative Medicine Partnership,

so the total budget is 3 billion, but actually only 1.6 billion is actual money,

and it's EU money, it's public taxpayers' money.

The rest is an in-kind contribution of

industry. So this is very clear a declaration by companies that says that this is what it costs

them. But is there any way to double check whether this is true or not? That's an open question,

and I understand that the Commission still hasn't solved this problem.

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