EU TV reports that vice president of the EU Commission Gunter Verheugen is “shocked” to learn that the EU’s legislative process is abused by special interest groups who don’t represent the public interest.

"What really shocked me that during the process I’ve done in recent years, I’ve found that in many cases, European legislation is triggered by interest groups,” said Verheugen.

It sounds like he disapproves, which is a good thing, but you’d think that someone in such a high position would be all too aware of all the lobbying that goes on behind the scenes.

But is Verheugen as innocent as he appears?

Maybe he wasn’t there in May 2007 at the leaving party for Bernd Gottschalk, the outgoing president of the VDA, Germany’s most powerful national car lobby group. Perhaps no one told him that Gottschalk thanked him for his “courageous and far-sighted” approach to “make it absolutely clear in Brussels that we will not accept a single, unified upper limit for CO2” ?

When he talked about special interest groups who don’t represent the public interest, didn’t he understand that the car lobby is one of the big culprits?

The car industry’s own figures showing that the people don’t want to buy the gas guzzling cars that they are so desperate to protect. In whose interest is that? Not mine, that’s for sure.

The way Verheugen tells it, you wouldn’t think that he’s not only aware of the lobbying, he’s taken sides as a result of it.

And it gets worse – Monique Goyens of the European Consumers Organisation, BEUC council told the conference on better regulation that the lobbying process was a “vicious game” where the lobbyist fights to gets hold of the proposal while it’s still a thought in someone at the EU’s mind. “Once it gets official,” she says, “it’s too late to influence anyway.”

But it’s not all gloom and doom. The decision to delay the vote in the Environment committee vote on CO2 emissions from cars followed a series of meetings with members of the committee by NGOs, who reminded MEPs of the weakening effect the amendments put forward by the industry committee would have on the legislation

And, last week’s result also demonstrates that MEPs do make the right decisions, despite being presented with such a powerful lobby with friends in high places, and disastrous “surrender amendments”. It just goes to show that the people’s lobby may not have all the connections, it may not have all the power, but it gets results.