Leaked documents reveal how a secretive alliance of eleven large multinational enterprises has worked to tear down the EU’s flagship human rights and climate law, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). The mostly US-based coalition, which calls itself the Competitiveness Roundtable, has targeted all EU institutions, governments in Europe’s capitals, as well as the Trump administration and other non-EU governments to serve its own interests. With European lawmakers soon moving ahead to completely dilute the CSDDD at the expense of human rights and the climate, this research exposes the fragility of Europe’s democracy.

While Europeans were told that their governments were negotiating a landmark law to hold corporations accountable for human rights abuses and climate damage, a secretive alliance of US fossil fuel giants was working behind the scenes to destroy it. Collaborating under the innocent-sounding name ‘Competitiveness Roundtable’, eleven multinational enterprises have worked closely to eviscerate several EU sustainability laws, including the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). This Competitiveness Roundtable may be unknown, but its members are a who’s-who of polluting, mainly US, multinationals, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Dow. The group seems to have run rings around all branches of the EU and the Trump administration to get what they want: scrapping, or at least hugely diluting, the CSDDD.

Leaked documents
obtained by SOMO reveal how, under the pretext of the now-near-magical concept of ‘competitiveness’, these companies plotted to hijack democratically adopted EU laws and strip them of all meaningful provisions, including those on climate transition plans, civil liability, and the scope of supply chains. EU officials appear not to have known who they were up against. But the documents obtained by SOMO show a high level of organisation and strategising with a clear facilitator: Teneo, a US public relations and consultancy company.

The documents indicate that many of the companies involved wanted to stay hidden from view. After all, if it were widely known that a secretive group of mostly American fossil fuel companies like Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Koch, Inc. was working as a coordinated organisation to dilute an EU climate and human rights law, that might raise questions and serious concern among the public and the policymakers they were targeting. Many of the companies in the Roundtable have never publicly spoken
out against the CSDDD.

In February 2025, the European Commission published the Omnibus I proposal(opens in new window)
, which aims to “simplify” several EU sustainability laws, including the CSDDD. The documents obtained by SOMO reveal that the Roundtable companies, which have been meeting weekly since at least March 2025, worked on deep interventions within each of the three EU institutions to get the Omnibus I package to align exactly with their views. The EU institutions are expected to reach a final agreement on Omnibus I by the end of 2025.

The documents reveal that the Roundtable companies’ activities in the Parliament are far more significant than what is visible in the EU Transparency Register(opens in new window)
.
Eight of the Roundtable’s lobbying meetings during the Strasbourg plenary sessions of May and June 2025, listed in the Transparency Register, show Teneo as the only attendee, thereby failing
to disclose the names of other Roundtable companies that participated in these meetings. Another three meetings the Roundtable held were not found in the EU Transparency Register(opens in new window)
at all.

“Divide and conquer” the Council

In the European Council, the Roundtable plotted to “divide and conquer” EU governments to get the climate article in the CSDDD deleted. In June 2025, during the final weeks of negotiations in the Council on the Omnibus I proposal, the Roundtable discussed lobbying EU government leaders to “intervene politically” to ensure its priorities were included in the Council’s negotiation mandate. Subsequently, German Chancellor Merz and French President Macron reportedly(opens in new window)
personally intervened(opens in new window)
in the Council’s political process, leading to a dramatic dilution(opens in new window)
of the texts(opens in new window)
negotiated in the months before the intervention. Several of the changes made to the texts strongly align with the Roundtable’s demands, including delaying and substantially weakening the climate obligations, scrapping EU civil liability provisions, and limiting the responsibility of companies to take responsibility for their supply chains (the ‘Tier 1’ restriction).

Additionally, the documents reveal that the Roundtable is still aiming to drum up a “blocking minority”
to overturn the Council’s negotiation mandate during the trilogue negotiations, which started in November 2025. By “tak[ing] advantage of the ‘weak’ Council negotiating mandate” and disagreements between EU Member States on “contentious articles”, the Competitiveness Roundtable companies hope to force the Danish Council presidency
to give up on including any form of climate obligations in the CSDDD – despite EU Member States’ agreement on this in the June 2025 Council mandate(opens in new window)
.

To implement the divide-and-conquer strategy, the Roundtable assigned specific companies to “establish rapporteurships” with different EU governments. TotalEnergies would target the French, Belgian, and Danish governments, and ExxonMobil would target Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania.

Circumventing “stubborn” European Commission departments

The Roundtable also discussed working on “circumvent[ing]” two “stubborn” European Commission departments involved in the Omnibus political process, DG JUST and DG FISMA,
which, in their view, were “unlikely to be willing to see our side of the story”. According to the documents, DG JUST opposed deleting the climate article and restricting the Directive’s scope to only very large enterprises. The Roundtable aimed to diminish the role of these departments by pressuring President Von der Leyen and Commissioners McGrath (DG JUST) and Albuquerque (DG FISMA) by “organising letters from Irish and German business groups” and using an event held by the European Roundtable for Industry to “target” Von der Leyen and McGrath.

Getting a right-wing majority to “ensure the most extreme position”

In the European Parliament, the Roundtable companies aimed to “ensure the most extreme position” on the CSDDD by getting the European People’s Party (EPP) to break with the centrist majority and “secure a right-leaning majority” in the Parliament instead. The Roundtable worked to “push” leading EPP Parliamentarian Jörgen Warborn, “to side with the right-wing parties as much as possible” in the Parliament’s JURI Committee. After repeatedly threatening(opens in new window)
to break(opens in new window)
with the centrist majority in the Parliament, the EPP and Warborn allied(opens in new window)
with the far-right to adopt the Omnibus I negotiation mandate in November 2025. Both the parliamentary draft report(opens in new window)
 Warborn, published in May, and the Parliament’s mandate(opens in new window)
 align with the Roundtable’s positions on climate, civil liability, and the scope of the value chain.

“Ramping up” the pressure from the Trump administration

In addition to directly targeting the EU institutions, the Roundtable also worked on keeping “close ties” with US diplomats, especially during the US-EU trade negotiations in the summer of 2025. The companies wanted the Trump administration to “ramp up the pressure” on the EU to see the CSDDD “as a key barrier to any [free trade agreement]” between the US and the EU. The Roundtable also supported the US Chamber of Commerce’s lobbying activities in EU and non-EU countries, including a white paper on extraterritoriality that it published(opens in new window)
in October 2025, which argued that non-EU companies and activities should be excluded from the scope of the CSDDD.

The Roundtable discussed leveraging the concerns of the EU automotive sector, which was desperate(opens in new window)
for relief from the US-imposed trade tariffs, to get the CSDDD scrapped or diluted “as a concession in negotiations on tariffs”. To achieve this, the Roundtable considered “activat[ing]” the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, European Association of Automotive Suppliers, and individual car companies like Stellantis.

In the EU-US trade agreement of August 2025, the EU committed(opens in new window)
to proposing changes to the CSDDD on at least three of the Roundtable’s priorities: civil liability, climate transition plans, and extraterritoriality.

Mobilising other countries “with minimal US visibility”

The Roundtable also set out to convince other countries that are major EU trade and investment partners to pressure the bloc on their CSDDD priorities. The Roundtable was particularly interested in mobilising countries in such a way that there was “minimal US visibility” by getting industry associations around the world to “activate national governments without making it a US issue”. The Roundtable hoped to orchestrate a “letter campaign by third countries / third country associations”, aimed at the Commission and EU Member States, and to “mobilise third countries to […] address Von der Leyen during the UN General Assembly in September”, COP30 in Brazil and the G20 Summit in South Africa. Chevron and ExxonMobil are listed as the leading companies in identifying suitable target countries for this Roundtable tactic.

A document dated May 2025 indicates that the Roundtable was keen to have a country publish an op-ed or open letter “similar to the one by QatarEnergy in the FT”^. QatarEnergy and the government of Qatar had previously threatened
to stop exporting liquefied natural gas to the EU if the CSDDD was enforced strictly. In October 2025, one day before a crucial vote on the Omnibus I proposal in the European Parliament, the governments of Qatar and the United States indeed published an open letter(opens in new window)
, calling for the law to be either repealed or modified in four areas, including climate, civil liability, and extraterritoriality.

Promoting anti-CSDDD messages through other channels

The Roundtable companies also funded at least one think tank to spread their anti-CSDDD message. In early August 2025, the Roundtable discussed paying the TEHA Group, a Brussels-based think tank, at least €185,000 to write a paper and organise an event on EU competitiveness in late September for “our companies” and “relevant policymakers”. Both the event and the report did happen, and neither mentioned how they were funded. The report echoes
the Roundtable’s positions on the CSDDD and CSRD and also casts doubt on the European Commission’s assessment of the economic impact of the CSDDD, claiming that companies’ implementation costs are much higher than the Commission’s calculations.

In response to a letter from SOMO, TEHA Group confirmed that the report was funded by ExxonMobil, Koch Government Affairs, LLC, TotalEnergies, Enterprise Mobility, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Santander.
The event with EU policymakers was funded by ExxonMobil. TEHA Group also stated that “the analyses and findings presented are the result of TEHA’s independent research and are not determined by, nor bound to, the views or positions of the supporting companies.”

The Roundtable documents also mention holding a targeted digital campaign on LinkedIn, including the use of “‘dark posts’
which are not saved/published on a company profile”, as an “escalation tactic” the companies considered using. SOMO was unable to confirm whether the Roundtable ultimately used “dark posts” in its lobbying campaign.

Foreign corporate interference undermines EU democracy

Though not illegal, the Roundtable’s activities represent more than just a well-executed corporate lobbying strategy. They are those of a corporate cabal, mainly comprising US companies, seeking to divide and conquer EU democracies to serve its own interests, at the expense of the climate and human rights. The Roundtable companies set out to demolish the CSDDD and are on the way to succeeding, with a final agreement on Omnibus I expected to be announced before the end of the year. Policymakers in Brussels and Europe’s capitals seem all too eager to let their ears hang to the demands of a small but powerful group of polluting multinationals as soon as they whisper the terms “competitiveness” and “simplification”. It underscores just how fragile Europe’s democracy is.

If the EU is serious about ensuring its sovereignty and upholding liberal democracy, in a world where these values are under severe pressure, opaque groups of big polluters must be excluded from EU lawmaking. Serving the interests of Big Oil and the Trump administration does not increase the EU’s “competitiveness” or strengthen the EU’s position in the world. On the contrary, it makes clear just how little it takes to subdue the EU’s democratic principles. What is needed now is an EU that dares to stand up to corporate capture, defends the rights of workers and communities, and protects the climate. That would place the EU in a clear and strong position, not beholden to vested interests.

SOMO invited all Roundtable companies and TEHA Group to respond to the findings in this article. Only Teneo,
TotalEnergies,
and TEHA Group
responded.