Thread: Lobbying and Corporate influence. A friend sent me a short piece on some payments made to Dutch political groups. Here is the piece. The translation as follows: 'TECH OWNER GIFTS 1 MILLION EUROS TO D66 AND 350,000 EUROS TO PvdD - D66 and Party of the Animals have both.. 
...received generous gifts from the Tech Entrepreneur Steven Schuurman. This week he handed over 350,000 Euros to PvdD [focused on animal rights and welfare] and D66 [the dutch branch of the alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe] can add one million Euros to its...
...campaign coffers. The 45 year old Schuurman, who made it rich from the IPO of his software company Elastic, told the Trouw Newspaper that he is using the money to support the Parties' climate change plans' Here is the Stock market share value for Elastic [NYSE: ESTC].
Note the recent spike in Market Capital. Here is a piece on Schuurman in Forbes. He is currently worth $1.6 billion. He also founded SpringSource which he sold to VMware in 2009 for a cool $420 million. forbes.com/profile/steven… So what does Elastic do?
Here is a little taster - Image recognition and facial search This is getting interesting. elastic.co/blog/image-rec… Let's look at who invests in Elastic. nasdaq.com/market-activit… All the usual suspects, JP Morgan, Blackrock, Goldman etc. The key shareholders being FMR LLC,
49% of which is owned by the Johnson Family, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidelity_… and 51% by employees and ex. employees including Peter Lynch, who set up the Lynch Foundation and is also on the Harvard Medical School board of Fellows en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lyn…. I digress...
D66 is lead by Sigrid Kaag, who is connected to numerous international organisations including African/Asian Dev banks, World bank, Euro bank for R&D, IMF, OECD and of course P4G – Partnering for Green Growth and the Global Goals 2030. The list is LONG. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigrid_Ka…
The PvdD party for animals is also well connected including to this: 'The Nicolaas G. Pierson Foundation is the research department of the PvdD. Founded in 2007, it is named after Niek Pierson, a Dutch economist and an early political donor of the party.' Significant financial
connections for both of these parties, together with connections to 'Climate Change', animal welfare and youth organisations. PvdD is also part of the European United Left–Nordic Green Left Group. An odd, but familiar pairing of finance and climate change - again.
So why the focus on the company that has given funding to these two groups? This is the thin edge of the wedge of corporate lobbying. There will be much more money where that came from, as long as the two parties push for reforms that include the introduction of a surveillance...
... state, which of course we suspect that Elastic is banking on, looking at their share price. Money for votes. It is, in the clear light of day, bribery. How many thousands more examples would we be able to find in governments and corporations around the world?
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