| SAN FRANCISCO
- November 12 - According to confidential documents obtained by
investigative journalist Gregory Palast and posted on the watchdog website
CorpWatch.org, top corporate executives carried out a series of closed-door
meetings with government officials to set the pro-business agenda for WTO
negotiations currently taking place in Doha, Qatar.
Three confidential documents from inside the World Trade Organization
Secretariat and a group of London's top finance executives calling
themselves the "British Invisibles," reveal the extraordinary secret
entanglement of business and government in designing the European
proposals for WTO rules. Many of these executives are the European
representatives of US financial giants like Morgan Stanley Dean Witter,
Goldman Sachs, Prudential Corporation and PriceWaterHouseCoopers.
Palast, reporting for CorpWatch, provides the smoking gun that corroborates
activists' long-time assertions that top corporate executives shape the
trade agenda in the US and Europe. The documents come from the think tank
Corporate Europe Observatory in the Netherlands and several other sources.
Palasts's report, "The WTO's Hidden Agenda," can be found on CorpWatch:
http://www.corpwatch.org
Documents are available at:
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/wto/background/2001/lotis.html
and
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/wto/background/2001/gatsdocs.html
CorpWatch is a watchdog group that works to hold corporations accountable
on human rights, labor rights and environmental justice.
Gregory Palast is an investigative journalist who writes a column in The
Observer, Britain's most respected Sunday newspaper and regularly reports
for BBC television.
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