I recently attended a couple of meetings in Brussels on the subject of corporate lobbying and the undue influence that it gives to big business in EU policy formation.

Of course the sole reason for the European Union's existence in its present form is to serve the interests of big business, but this doesn't mean that we shouldn't resist specific, blatant examples of the way this works.

Aside from the possibility of actually making direct progress in the struggle against the neoliberal EU, many of the injustices involved in ensuring corporate domination of decision-making are so blatant as to be basically indefensible.

Exposing them thus poses a problem for the Eurocracy, which likes to pretend that it exists to promote peace between nations, love, peace and harmony.

As I have said before in this column, however, John and Yoko do not preside over the European Commission, and the only "peace" corporate capital is interested in is a piece of whatever profitable action is going.

Hence the scandal of the commission's "expert groups." There are as many as 1,000 expert groups.

Their official function is to advise the commission on policy, an important task which has its impact on your life and mine, because this most Eurocratic of bodies, unelected though it is, has the exclusive right to initiate legislation at EU level.

What's especially worrying is that the men and (probably very few) women on these expert groups, while no doubt genuinely experts, are for the most part employed by major corporations or paid to lobby on their behalf.

Some groups, indeed, are almost exclusively made up of such individuals, and there is at least one which contains representatives of no other section of society.

No trade unionists, no representatives of NGOs or activist groups, no independent academics, no-one to express the views of small firms.

I have little personal experience of the commission's expert groups, but I do know from having researched corporate influence over policy relating to genetically modified organisms that all of the experts who give such advice to the EU's own European food safety authority are from biotech industries.

I raised this matter with a commission official a couple of years ago and he said they simply couldn't find anyone outside the industry who had the necessary expertise.

I gave him the name and details of Testbiotech, a Munich-based group which employs a number of experts in the relevant sciences and which is very critical of the industry.

Perhaps he followed this up and perhaps he didn't, but the point is, when doing my own research it had taken me less than five minutes of online searching to find this body, which isn't even the only place where critical scientists can be found.

This reliance on corporate-employed specialist opinion is a particularly egregious example of the blatant injustices mentioned above.

This kind of thing even bothers Europhiles, as they know it exposes the reality of their Nobel peace prize-winning union.

So, although when action was begun it was by progressive MEPs who were anything but Europhile, the rest of the European Parliament went along with them and took surprisingly robust action.

They took, in fact, the only form of action that could possibly have the commission peeping down anxiously from its ivory tower (it's a glass tower actually, but you know what I mean).

Two years ago they froze the budget for the expert groups.

No more money would be allocated to run them until the commission met the European Parliament's conditions.

These were fourfold, and each dealt with a specific abuse.

First, corporate personnel must be balanced by experts from other sectors.

Second, when lobbyists who are paid by one interest or another sit on an expert group they must do so as declared representatives of the companies or other bodies who provide their finance. As things stand, only actual employees of companies must do this, not lobbyists paid by the job.

Third, the current system, under which the commission officials involved appear simply to invite anyone they like, open calls - only occasionally used now - would become obligatory across the board. In other words, to find your experts you will have to advertise. This hardly seems a radical demand.

The final condition for renewing funding is "full transparency." We have a right to know what is going on, to know what advice is coming from where.

Cutting off funding got the commission's attention, but as it turns out not sufficiently to get it to address these matters at all adequately.

Several new expert groups have been set up since the funding was cut, and yet even these show for the most part no improvement.

The more powerful the section of the commission involved, the more corporate-dominated its expert groups.

For example, 80 per cent of those appointed by the directorate-general (DG) which deals with taxation and customs come from big business. Only 1 per cent come from the labour movement and 3 per cent from small businesses.

In the case of the DG for enterprise and industry, 64 per cent come from corporate interests.

Across the board, corporate interests make up, in every case, more than half of the experts appointed since the budgetary freeze was imposed.

The results, as the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (Alter-EU), which supplied these figures, puts it, is that "tax-dodgers advise on tax reform. Giant telecommunications companies dominate the debate on data privacy [and] pro-big business experts monopolise advice on tackling the eurocrisis."