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Summary: While bullying bloggers, bribing publishers and besieging staff using an aggressive legion of lawyers the EPO's management grants many thousands of unlawful patents and flaunts diplomatic immunity; is this the best Europe has to offer?

EARLIER on we published a post about António Campinos spending millions more on lawyers. Is this a patent office or a litigation office? What has the EPO become? Even Benoît Battistelli doesn't seem to have spent that much money on lawyers, right? The video above discusses some of that ugly legacy of the Office, which including siccing lawyers at yours truly as well (yes, they've threatened bloggers, too).

"The "Mafia" of the EPO (the staff calls the managers "Mafia") is now a litigation machine.""Campinos lawyers up against EPO staff," one reader alerted us today. Apparently some people are deeply perturbed by this because they have cases in progress (or cases planned) against the EPO. "In case you haven't heard about this yet," said the reader, "[i]t seems that António is planning on investing some of his Covid-19 gains in litigation against EPO staff. He wants to use the funds for hiring expensive Swiss and French corporate lawyers to fend off pending and future lawsuits before the ILOAT in Geneva. All he needs now is the rubber-stamped approval of the Administrative Council."

The "Mafia" of the EPO (the staff calls the managers "Mafia") is now a litigation machine. Not only does it bribe the media; it also threatens the media using lawyers (the 'disobedient' publishers who dare insinuate that EPO is anything but spectacular) and moreover crushes staff that challenges real abuses.

The video above discusses the latest on the Education and Childcare reform, citing a Central Staff Committee (CSC) "counter-proposal and GCC [General Consultative Committee] opinion". The following text was circulated to explain what had happened 2 weeks ago:

The Central Staff Committee (CSC) had submitted a last-chance counter-proposal to try to mitigate the effects of the reform on children in The Hague, Berlin and Vienna, as well as arguments in favour of this initiative. The President postponed the GCC meeting from the 29 April to the 4 May allegedly for his service “to take the time to study the arguments [we] now bring as well as the new counter-proposal/fallback position and its financial implication.”

In the meeting, the President did not concretely address the substance of our latest proposals. Instead, we had the “privilege”, for the first time in the history of the General Consultative Committee (GCC), to be the spectators of a play in which the Chief of Staff, PD People, PD Corporate Policies and lower-ranking officials took turns to speak and read out their parts of a text prepared in advance. The performance lasted about three quarters of an hour.

After that we could make some of our points but, given the circumstances, we could not expect the administration to make any statement that deviated from their pre-written script.

The President closed the debate and invited us to submit our opinion in writing.

This is not a dialogue at all. Far from it! It's worse than a joke and it's insulting considering how much effort was put into the proposals.

"You may also find a document," the CSC said, "including both our counter-proposal and our opinion here [PDF]." [Those are detailed proposals]

Here is the GCC opinion (by the CSC members in the GCC) on education reform 2021. [PDF]

Campinos never bothered reading these (not himself anyway), so at least the public can see what's at stake and judge the situation accordingly. ⬆