angelburst29
The Living Force
whitecoast said:
I wonder, considering this event is happening at the beginning of April, if this massive data leak - that enables shell firms and their owners to cover up their business dealings - has anything to do with a proposed EU legislation on “Trade Secrets Protection”, which the European Parliament will vote on Thursday April 14? It creates excessive rights to secrecy for businesses: it is a direct threat to the work of journalists and their sources, whistleblowers, employees' freedom of expression, and rights to access public interest information.
It's been stated, that the anonymous source submitted "encrypted internal documents" from Mossack Fonseca starting over a year ago. It's within this same time frame that "additional legislation" was in the works for this “Trade Secrets Protection”, by the EU.
Although this EU legislation focuses mainly on trade secrets for/on medicines, pesticides, car emissions, etc., in the public domain, it's playing down the "small print" on how financing, investment and tax havens come under it's definition of "trade secrets"?
This is a long article, but I'll list a few points that might colligate with the leaks on the "Panama Papers".
“Trade Secrets Protection”
A New Right To Secrecy For Companies, And A Dangerous EU Legislative Proposal Which Must Be Rejected
http://corporateeurope.org/power-lobbies/2016/03/trade-secrets-protection
March 30th 2016 - Trade secrets are everything companies keep secret to stay ahead of competitors. A secret recipe or manufacturing process, plans of a new product, a list of clients, prototypes... The theft of trade secrets can be a real problem for companies, and is already punished in all EU Member States. But there was no uniform legislation on the matter at the EU level.
* A small group of lobbyists working for large multinational companies (Dupont, General Electric, Intel, Nestlé, Michelin, Safran, Alstom…) convinced the European Commission to draft such a legislation, and helped it all along the way. The problem is that they were too successful in their lobbying: they transformed a legislation which should have regulated fair competition between companies into something resembling a blanket right to corporate secrecy, which now threatens anyone in society who sometimes needs access to companies' internal information without their consent: consumers, employees, journalists, scientists...
* The European Parliament is expected to vote on 14 April 2016 on the “Directive on the protection of undisclosed know-how and business information (trade secrets) against their unlawful acquisition, use and disclosure”. The text can no longer be changed. The directive initially drafted by the European Commission favored companies’ economic rights at the expense of citizens’ political rights. Unfortunately, despite some improvements, the compromise text still does the same. We think it is essential that MEPs reject it and ask the Commission to come up with a better one, but they are under heavy pressure from multinational corporations to adopt it.
* With the very broad and vague definition1 used in this draft directive, almost all internal information within a company can be considered a trade secret. With this text, companies do not need to pro-actively identify which information they consider a trade secret, as states do when they put “top secret” or “confidential” labels on documents.
* But employees, journalists, consumers... sometimes also need to have access to, use and publish such information without the company's consent, and would now face legal threats and heavy fines for doing so.
* An additional problem is that the Directive foresees precautionary measures to prohibit the disclosure of documents and proofs during legal procedures, hiding them from public sight. While it is true that certain companies sue others for the sole purpose of accessing their trade secrets and that this is a problem, why should such measures, which risk undermining the rights of defence, apply to individuals?
* Journalists will be directly impacted by the Directive. References to the right to information as defined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights are made in the text, but the Charter applies regardless of it being mentioned so this does not make a difference:
companies will be given the right to sue anyone publishing information they consider a trade secret, and the judge will have to balance this economic right with journalists' political right to inform.
* These are (most of the time) employees willing to reveal actions or plans of their employers that they think harm the public interest. They are often the main source of information of the media or public authorities on corporate misbehaviour, and this has been a very thorny issue in the negotiations since the Commission's proposal. But even now, whistleblowers are only protected when they act “for the purpose of protecting the public general interest” (Article 5) and when they reveal a “misconduct, wrongdoing or illegal activity”: this restrictive list leaves large gaps. They (and journalists using their information) will need to demonstrate to the judge that they acted with “the purpose of protecting the public general interest”: the burden of the proof is on them, and while large companies can afford long and expensive legal procedures, individuals usually cannot.
(Article continues.)
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