Corporate Europe Observatory: A Black Hole of Hypocrisy
The Transparency NGO that is Hiding its own Dark Funding Sources
Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) call themselves an industry watchdog group, regularly producing reports and investigations into corporate lobbying in an attempt to portray a world of untethered, dark industry lobbying interfering with the democratic process. But what reality shows is an untethered NGO that is working in the shadows to undermine the democratic dialogue process, financed by dark, foreign sources on a funding carousel.
The activist group no longer campaigns on transparency issues. Much of their resources have been directed to environmental health campaigns (climate, biodiversity, GMOs, pesticides, PFAS, chemicals, plastics, nicotine…). Their published materials can be quite amusing and sadly predictable since they do not have any scientists or technical expertise. When Corporate Europe Observatory, for example, led the charge to classify all new plant gene editing techniques as GMOs, a campaign that set regulations on this important research back more than a decade in Europe, the NGO had no scientific foundation. They simply ran an anti-industry fear campaign (Monsanto!!!) that divided the activist community’s position, lifting the radical wing to the fore. Organic farmers could have benefited from better seed technologies, but instead now, cannot compete.
CEO have become a flanking tool for other activist campaigns, trying to cast doubt on other stakeholders and trying to exclude industry groups from the dialogue process. Democracy, for Corporate Europe Observatory, is a world where only their allies are allowed to speak, industry actors are excluded from the rooms and regulators just implement their fear-laden policy demands.
Their campaigns are often comical though. Every year at the UNFCCC COP climate summits, they dust off their Kick Big Polluters Out campaign, tweaking their reports, even though it is widely seen that well-funded activist NGOs, foundations and the climate lobby have taken over the UN conference process.
Corporate Europe Observatory claim they are representing the people but most of their campaign actions in Brussels are comprised of a handful of paid activists. Power to the people, or rather … to the people we like. With every report and investigation, these blurry-eyed activists drinking deeper from their anti-industry Kool-Aid jug, are no longer capable of seeing how their actions and lobbying have become more deceitful and undemocratic than anything industry has ever done.
Who is funding this ragtag band of hypocrites and motivating their target campaigns? That is actually a difficult question. This NGO, built on the demand for transparency, does not want you to know the financial sources pulling their strings. Corporate Europe Observatory have a funding page, but almost half of the groups donating to them are donor-advised, comprising more than half of their €1.12 million budget.
Donor-advised funds mean donations from dark sources are given to a foundation earmarked for a certain NGO group or campaign, but the donation remains anonymous (and still tax deductible). The foundations receive a nice commission (often around 10%) in return for protecting the anonymity of the interest group wanting to give Corporate Europe Observatory its campaign payola. The money could be coming from US tort lawyers, green energy groups, the organic food industry lobby, competing corporations with lucrative alternatives should a substance be banned… Nobody, except a couple campaigners inside CEO and the foundation fund manager, are allowed to know who is actually behind the donation.
If we don’t know at all who is funding these donor-advised funds then we don’t know who is driving Corporate Europe Observatory’s campaign objectives. There is no transparency here. If industry ever tried such a dark tactic, CEO would certainly launch an investigation and a large group of NGOs would join them in campaigning to stop that practice. Instead, they are pocketing the cash and we are all expected to look away.
Some of CEO’s Dark Funding Sources
What follows are a list of some of Corporate Europe Observatory’s non-transparent funding groups in 2024 from the list on their Profit and Loss page.
Tides
Tides is perhaps the oldest donor-advised fund. Not set up by a particular philanthropist, it is essentially a clearing house for NGO funding. They call themselves a “non-profit accelerator”. Money comes in, money goes out, and in the case of Corporate Europe Observatory, they net € 54,729 from some interest group (as Tides is an American operation, the number was probably round prior to currency conversion). 2025 figures have upped the Tides funding to 90,000 USD so there are some Americans who see a value in CEO disrupting the European policy process. On the CEO funders page, they mention Broad Reach Foundation with Tides, so perhaps they are the funders. The foundation’s website has one vague sentence and nothing more but it is clear they are not to be confused with the Broadreach Foundation (no space) that gives scholarships to children. A deeper search into the Broad Reach Foundation found them to be based in the Philippines producing ecological bricks. Why would this organization fund a band of anti-industry rednecks in Brussels?
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors
This 100% donor-advised fund must not be confused with any of the bouquet of Rockefeller foundations. Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors is a consultancy that networks with a large number of foundations, often acting as fiscal sponsors to set up campaigns that activists discretely want to realize. €229,000 was transferred into Corporate Europe Observatory’s coffers by some American interest group or groups wanting to see Europe continue to be unable to pass innovative, pro-trade, pro-business policies. Who are these foreign interest groups? Why isn’t anyone asking?
Are there any more American interest groups discretely funding Corporate Europe Observatory campaigns that threaten to impoverish Europeans? Of course.
Luminate
Luminate is another American foundation with an interest in Corporate Europe Observatory (donating almost €200,000 in the last four years). But the foundation itself is not very illuminating on how they are funded. It was set up by the Omidyar Group, “a diverse collection of companies, organizations and initiatives, each guided by its own approach”. They (I am not sure who the “they” actually is) set up Reset which Corporate Europe Observatory claimed was funding their campaign to stop Big Tech. The link on the CEO funders page is broken though. Reset, now an “independent organization, was incubated as a Luminate initiative in partnership with the Sandler Foundation”. There are many Sandler foundations, mostly supporting the arts, so I just have to give up. The origin of this Corporate Europe Observatory funding source just doesn’t want to be found.
Global Greengrants Fund
As hundreds of thousands of euros have poured into Corporate Europe Observatory accounts over the last twelve years from the Global Greengrants Fund, you would kind of wish the NGO would learn to properly spell the name of this US-based fiscal sponsor. As a fiscal sponsor, they take money from foundations to set up and run groups that then pretend to be NGOs. The Firebreak did an exposé into how The Agroecology Fund went from being a small group supporting peasant agriculture to a large lobbying force with more than $100 million a year from US tech billionaire foundations. This happened when the fund changed fiscal sponsors in 2022 to the Global Greengrants Fund, who then redefined agroecology as a means to mitigate climate change (fact check: it isn’t). The commissions GGF received from that $100 million a year could continue to support groups like Corporate Europe Observatory in perpetuity (... until some blogger in Brussels noticed that CEO founder, Olivier Hoedeman, was sitting on the Global Greengrants Fund UK/EU board and his influence was a conflict of interest).
Combined Climate Funders
Corporate Europe Observatory claimed to have received €30,000 in 2024 from Combined Climate Funders, except that there is no such group with that name (a bit like CS Marin, another CEO funder from the fog). It is a general term for groups of foundations who combine their funds to support climate change NGOs (which CEO is not). Which group is it? Which foundations want an anti-industry attack NGO to do something climate related? Fighting climate change is good, so I suppose transparency doesn’t matter.
European Climate Foundation
One such combined climate funder is the European Climate Foundation (ECF), which is not a foundation but a fiscal sponsor discretely funding a large part of the climate activism, research, lobbying, media reporting and regulations in Europe. The Firebreak translated an excellent investigation by Florence Autret into this non-transparent lobbying group. ECF published zero information on where their money came from (mostly US tech billionaire philanthropists) and where it was spent. All we know is that in their last published two-page balance sheet, in 2023, they had a budget of €275 million. That is not a typo:
The European Climate Foundation spent €275 million in 2023 on European climate campaigns, UNFCCC COPs, Davos, Greta, EU Commission regulations … but was not at all transparent.
The €200,000 Corporate Europe Observatory received from this fiscal sponsor was nothing special (after all, CEO employs no climate scientists). The European Climate Foundation has always given generously to most NGOs operating in the EU environmental field (from those who declare their funding) to ensure that whenever the ECF have a new campaign or policy platform, all of the NGOs will join and support it. I never knew you could so easily train a rottweiler.
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Corporate Europe Observatory also accepts significant funding from diverse groups, often with anti-Western objectives, be it Lebanese industrialists, Quakers, asset managers and a shady maze of foundations set up by a discrete German businessman. Their anti-democratic objectives and efforts to distort the European dialogue and policy processes seem to have a broad global appeal. This is definitely the case with American interest groups hiding in the shadows.
As for the media, shouldn’t journalists be reporting this information as the scandal it rightly is? Well … no. Corporate Europe Observatory personally attack anyone who dares challenge them, including the author of this article. Or they fund them, keeping close ties with journalists who share their ilk like Stéphane Horel or Stéphane Content. A few years back, they were advertising for journalists who could be bought and paid for.
If the leaders of Corporate Europe Observatory had even the smallest shred of integrity, they would declare that they would no longer receive funding from these dark, donor-advised funds, publish the interest groups funding their campaigns and join The Firebreak in demanding reform of the worst non-transparent foundation funding practices.
If they don’t, as I expect, then the group must be declared in violation of the European Transparency Initiative standards, the employees of Corporate Europe Observatory then denied access to European Commission regulators with no entrance allowed to institutions like the European Parliament. Otherwise, the media, regulators and the rest of the NGO community would be sharing in the hypocrisy of Corporate Europe Observatory.