Secret Documents Reveal WTO-Corporate Collusion

12 November 2001

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 htt p://www.corpwatch.org/issues/wto/background/2001/gatsdocs.html

CorpWatch Media release. 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.

Action Alerts	PMA's newsletter	What's on where	Peace links	Help PMA grow	How PMA can help you	Petition Forms	Site Map