While there has been no of-
ficial announcement of
his climb up the
Bilderberg ladder, the news of Barroso’s “promotion” was revealed this week by Visão magazine, one of the many national media outlets owned by Francisco Pinto Balsemão, 77, himself a former Portuguese Prime Minister and founder of the ruling Social Democratic Party.
But Barroso is not a newcomer to this secret gathering of political leaders and experts from industry, finance, academia and the media, with this week’s meeting in Telfs-Buchen, Austria being his sixth or seventh appearance at the conference.
According to fellow Bilderberger and former Portuguese Minister Nuno Morais Sarmento, the decision to place Barroso on the steering committee was easy to foresee. In comments to Visão magazine, he explains that Pinto Balsemão and Barroso “have a close relationship, which is the result of mutual admiration. To me, this makes perfect sense. There is no better Portuguese to have been chosen.”
Perhaps Barroso’s most notable visit came in June 2004 when he became the first acting Portuguese Prime Minister to attend.
Previously, attendees such as Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, former Portuguese Prime Ministers José Sócrates and Pedro Santana Lopes had been invited prior to taking charge of their respective countries.
Ricardo Salgado, former CEO of the collapsed BES bank, has also attended the conference in the past, with his great uncle Manuel Espírito Santo, regularly entertaining Bilderberg founder Prince Bernard of Holland at his home in Lisbon prior to the Portuguese Revolution.
But as it turns out, Barroso’s presence in 2004 was well-timed, as four months later he resigned as prime minister and was unveiled as the new European Commission president, a position he held for ten years.
The conference, which started on Thursday and runs through to Sunday, now in its 33rd year, will have around 140 participants present from 22 countries.
The meeting is usually held at the beginning of June, and normally follows the G7 summit.
Organisers of the event have, in recent years, become more public as to the nature of the event, and have this week issued a statement explaining that the conference is designed to “foster dialogue between Europe and North America.”
They further reveal that “the participants are not bound by the conventions of their office or by pre-agreed positions. As such, they can take time to listen, reflect and gather insights.
“There is no detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued”, the statement explains.
But despite stressing the informal nature of the four-day meeting, participants have been told that items up for discussion this year will include artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, chemical weapon threats, current economic issues, European strategy, globalisation, Greece, Iran, the Middle East, NATO, Russia, terrorism, the United Kingdom, the USA and the all important US Elections.
Besides Durão Barroso and Francisco Balsemão, a third Portuguese national, former Socialist-government minister and European Justice Commissioner António Vitorino, has been invited to attend.
In keeping with previous years, the two largest political parties in Portugal will once again be represented.
Other international guests include British Chancellor George Osborne, prime ministers, a strong contingent from Google and CEOs from banks, the oil and the arms industries.
Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary will be making his debut at the Bilderberg conference, and will be surrounded by a number of influential bankers from the likes of the ECB, HSBC, Banco Santander, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs.
With such powerful attendees and lack of information emanating from the conference, the Bilderbergs have come under regular scrutiny and have been successively accused of orchestrating a new world order with the aid of mostly unelected officials.
The Guardian this week published a piece under the headline ‘Forget the G7 summit – Bilderberg is where the big guns go’, and in explaining the meeting, assumed a tongue-in-cheek line when Charlie Skelton wrote: “With participants this powerful, and an agenda containing this many hot topics, the Telfs policy conference is sure to be covered in depth by the world’s press. And by ‘sure to be’, I mean probably won’t be. For reasons that, as ever, escape me.”