From Friday:

Summary: A series contemplating Benoît Battistelli's sudden interest in Angola, a country with no European Patents but plenty of connections to António Campinos

TODAY, on a Sunday, we begin a long new series about the EPO. The timing seems perfect.

The minutes of the June 2017 meeting of the EPO Administrative Council confirm that Battistelli has been authorised to open negotiations on a validation agreement with Angola (dated Friday). It's the favourite day for the EPO to dump some words (e.g. in the intranet) or formal documents it prefers not to get noticed. There are already internal jokes about those Friday 'spills'... always check what's being buried and where/why.

"There are already internal jokes about those Friday 'spills'... always check what's being buried and where/why."The EPO's new relationship with Angola is rather predictable; we wrote about the photo-ops before. Why Angola? It is not, after all, a former French colony. An HTML version of the validation agreement concluded with Tunisia in 2012 is now available for future comparisons. Remember that Angola is a former colony of Portugal and António Campinos is set up (or groomed) to become Battistelli's successor, as we noted yesterday. Campinos is a dual French/Portugese national and his father, Joaquim Jorge de Pinho Campinos, was born in Lobito (Angola).

Does Angola really matter for the EPO? The numbers (of lack thereof) speak for themselves:

It's not hard to see why it's tempting to suspect a political aspect to all of this. Prepare for some rather embarrassing things (for António Campinos and Benoît Battistelli) to be shown over the coming weeks. ⬆