11.26.16
Benoît Battistelli’s Affinity for Tiny Countries Exploits the Ease of ‘Buying’ Their Votes
Good “bang for the buck” when cooperation money (or something along those lines) is granted (‘gifted’) to countries with low overall capital
Summary: The tyrannical boss of the EPO keeps his job by ensuring that small nations with a vote of equal weight to that of nations like France or Germany simply behave like “yes men” or at worst abstain from voting
LIKE the American patent system, the EPO has a big budget, but it’s often misused in favour of large corporations (or rich investors) rather than actual inventors.
What’s more, in the EPO at least, President Battistelli is said to be buying votes where he can. Tiny countries like Monaco get visited (new epo.org link to a new puff piece) for photo ops and as someone told us in the comments, it’s a country that got filed just FOUR (yes, 4!) EPO patents, so its relevance to the EPO is close to zero. But it’s only the country’s vote that Battistelli must be after. We wrote about this as recently as a week ago in relation to Lithuania. Battistelli — being the extremely unpopular chief of the EPO — likes small, tiny, corruptible countries because their votes count as much as big countries’ votes. This is the only way he can survive in his job. Watch this obscure blog that’s being promoted by the EPO (yesterday). It’s called “Monaco Life” and it’s a useless puff piece which says: “On the sidelines of the second meeting of the European Patent Office online users’ days, being held in Monaco from November 24 to 25, the Principality, represented by Jean Castellini, Minister of Finance and Economy, and the European Patent Organisation, represented by the President of the European Patent Office, Benoît Battistelli, have signed a working agreement that will bring the two sides closer.”
“People at the EPO are rightly concerned about their employer becoming a banana republic.”Yes, for 4 patents!
People at the EPO are rightly concerned about their employer becoming a banana republic. It does, after all, put their job and their whole career in jeopardy. It’s no longer much of a badge of honour to say you work (or worked) for the EPO and this new comment takes stock of the lies about the staff, courtesy of PwC. To quote: “Maybe there is a Triumvirate in the making with 3 President’s, e.g. BB for protocol matters, a new one for the executive EPO part and one for the BoA. The advantages would be that its suits BB’s royal ambitions and he can focus on his visits to Monaco, etc and high state visits according to protocol. Furthermore the AC can appoint somebody that really knows how an organisation with social partners works. Finally the story with BoA we all know. (Remark: to whom it may concern there is also a HR make-over in the pipe line, basically masking the social mess with a perfume of new PwC business clichés)…”
Speaking of small countries, a second article about the EPO came from Luxembourg this past week (not the first this year), in spite of being a very small nation. The German media is conspicuously quiet, but this article is in German yet not from Germany. Can anyone from Luxembourg or Germany translate this for us? SUEPO seems to have taken note of this second article, so perhaps they too intend to produce a translation. Here is the first article, which we have already mentioned the other day (SUEPO has already taken note of both articles). █
Related article: Benoît Battistelli: “An Earthquake Would be Needed for the Administrative Council… Not to Support My Major Proposals.”
Content is available under CC-BY-SA