Jörgen Warborn, rapporteur for the first Omnibus, a Parliamentarian under foreign influence

15 December 2025

As the European Parliament prepares to adopt the Omnibus I Directive on Tuesday 16 December, which undermines the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence legislation, BLOOM is filing a complaint with the Advisory Committee on the Conduct of Members of the European Parliament against the rapporteur of the text, Jörgen Warborn, for conflicts of interest, collusion with foreign powers and betrayal of the higher interests of the European Union.

Our investigation highlights multiple violations of the European Parliament’s code of conduct and reveals that Mr Warborn has been the vehicle for the US campaign of interference against the European Union, having worked as rapporteur for an unprecedented alliance between the right and the far right, in line with the strategy of the « Competitiveness Roundtable », which brings together American multinationals united by the desire to torpedo the European Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D).

A member of the European People’s Party (EPP) since his election to the European Parliament in June 2019, Jörgen Warborn is a Swedish politician who describes himself on LinkedIn as “fighting for freedom and entrepreneurship, against socialism and bureaucracy“.

A substitute member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs, Mr Warborn was appointed rapporteur for the first Omnibus on 18 March 2025. In accordance with the European Parliament’s Rules of Procedure, he is then “responsible for preparing the committee’s report and presenting it on behalf of the committee to Parliament“.

A key figure in the parliamentary process surrounding Omnibus I, the first act of the European Commission’s deregulation initiative, Mr Warborn stated on 20 March 2025 in his Declaration of Knowledge of Conflicts of Interest that he was “not aware of having a conflict of interest in relation to [his] responsibilities as office holder, or in relation to the report or opinion or the delegation or negotiations declared“.

However, the European Union’s transparency register and the parliamentary debate tell a very different story, against a backdrop of conflict of interest and foreign interference, culminating in a trip to Washington in early December, in the final stages of the trilogue that sealed the fate of the CS3D.

Jörgen Warborn, Member of the European Parliament and president of a lobby group!

Small and Medium Entrepreneurs of Europe, also known as SME Europe, is a lobbying entity registered in the European Union’s transparency register since June 2016, which aims to “shape EU policies in a more SME friendly way“.

In its statutes, SME Europe states that its “purpose is to support and promote the interests of small and medium-sized enterprises, craft trades and the liberal professions in their relations with the political institutions of the European Union“. The same message is echoed on its website, where SME Europe presents itself as “the biggest political organisation in Europe that operates for the rights of small and medium sized enterprises, creating and developing a common European SME friedly policy“.

However, this lobbying body is chaired by Jörgen Warborn himself, who acknowledged in his declaration of private interests as a Member of the European Parliament that he was its chairman.

When he took on the role of rapporteur for the Omnibus, Jörgen Warborn failed to disclose his private interests and his role as a lobbyist, placing himself in a conflict of interest.

Throughout the parliamentary procedure relating to Omnibus I, Jörgen Warborn constantly changed hats according to the circumstances. On 29 April 2025, for example, Mr Warborn spoke at the SME Europe Economic Leadership Forum at 9.30 a.m. in his capacity as President of SME Europe and Co-Chair of the SME Circle, and at 10 a.m. in his capacity as rapporteur for Omnibus I, as revealed by ten NGOs, including Transparency International, Corporate Europe Observatory, The Good Lobby, and Notre Affaire à Tous in a complaint filed on December 15 with the Advisory Committee on this specific matter. 

Even more worrying is that, without disclosing his conflict of interest, Mr Warborn included multiple amendments in his draft report presented to the Legal Affairs Committee to raise the thresholds for the application of the law and thus exempt the vast majority of companies that were subject to extra-financial reporting (CSRD) and duty of care (CS3D).

But the story does not end there.

While Omnibus I was the target of a large-scale interference campaign by the White House, Jörgen Warborn was the zealous relay for this American interference within the European Parliament, taking up the demands of the Trump administration and American companies united within the “Competitiveness Roundtable”, foremost among which are Chevron, ExxonMobil, Koch, JPMorgan and Dow Chemical.

US interference in European parliamentary democracy

The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D), which had been opposed by industrial lobbies for years and was enacted in June 2024, promised to end the impunity of multinationals by establishing a harmonised civil liability regime at European level and requiring large companies operating within the EU to implement a climate transition plan aligned with the objectives of the Paris Agreement and carbon neutrality by 2050.

On 26 February 2025, the publication of Omnibus I, considered illegal by more than 100 law professors and lawyers and a case of maladministration by the European Commission by the European Ombudsman, reawakened the appetites of industrial lobbies, but also of the Trump administration, determined to torpedo European social, environmental and climate legislation.

On 12 March 2025, a US senator introduced a bill in the Senate to prohibit US companies from complying with European due diligence requirements. Against a backdrop of high trade tensions, Donald Trump, following his meeting with Ursula von der Leyen in Scotland, succeeded in inserting a paragraph dedicated to the duty of care into the joint statement by the United States and the European Union published on 21 August 2025, in order to exempt American companies from it. While the European Parliament was initiating parliamentary debate on the issue, the White House returned to the fray in October with a letter from Donald Trump to Ursula von der Leyen and a letter from the US and Qatari energy ministries to the 27 EU Member States.

Far from protecting himself from American pressure to defend European sovereignty, Jörgen Warborn met with the American lobbying firm Teneo on 14 April 2025. However, as revealed by the Dutch Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) in early December, Teneo was spearheading the Competitiveness Roundtable, an ad hoc alliance of a dozen American companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Koch and Dow Chemical, joined by French oil major TotalEnergies.

The documents obtained and published by SOMO shed light on the objectives and strategy of Teneo and the companies in the Competitiveness Roundtable to achieve its goals:

“secure a right-leaning majority to delete Article 22, keep the removal of EU civil liability and add extraterritorial scope”. 

“Encourage strong EPP and ECR collaboration”

“Push the rapporteur to side with the right-wing parties as much as possible and for the ECR to take an active role in the compromise amendments negotiations”

But on 9 September 2025, as pressure from the United States on the European Union had intensified over the summer, Jörgen Warborn met with the American oil company Koch, a member of the Competitiveness Roundtable. Then, on 23 September 2025, he met with the American Chamber of Commerce to the EU.

This series of meetings with American lobbyists and companies supports the theory of American interference relayed within the European Parliament by Jörgen Warborn, the rapporteur of the text, who modelled its objectives and negotiation strategy on those of Teneo.

An American liaison officer within the European Parliament?

On October 1st 2025, at the opening of the parliamentary debate in the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee, and in accordance with the roadmap established by Teneo, Mr Warborn announced on LinkedIn that he had sealed an agreement “with a clear majority”… with the far right! Mr Warborn then used this immoral agreement, which crossed the Rubicon of republican acceptability and broke the “cordon sanitaire”, to engage in anti-democratic blackmail, denounced as such by the parliamentary left, by putting a knife to the throats of the “von der Leyen majority” groups (liberal right Renew, socialists S&D and ecologists Greens/EFA). What Mr Warborn was doing was unprecedented in the European Parliament: he was summoning the “von der Leyen majority” to accept, without negotiating a single comma, the agreement he was submitting to them, threatening to turn to the far right to push through the agreement he had sealed with them, which was even more destructive to the duty of vigilance. The von der Leyen majority, for various reasons, accepted this blackmail when it came to the vote in the Legal Affairs Committee.

This announcement caused an uproar within European institutions, with the rapporteur for the the CS3D, Lara Wolters, a dutch socialist MEP, who had enabled the adoption of this legislation in 2024, to resign from her role as shadow rapporteur for the Socialist Group. Knocked out, the Parliament, which has been patiently working for decades to build compromises between the conservative right, the liberal right, socialists and environmentalists, entered a new era with fears that this brutal method would usher in a new era of predators.

At the time of the plenary vote on 22 October 2025, the von der Leyen majority regained its composure: the environmentalists and some of the socialists refused to bow to Jörgen Warborn’s blackmail. Warborn then opted to simply apply the strategy suggested by the Competitiveness Roundtable, negotiating with the far-right ECR group to table 30 identical amendments ahead of the plenary vote on 13 November 2025, as shown in the voting list published by the European Parliament Secretariat. Among other things, a series of amendments (such as amendments 287 and 228 [1] ) aimed to delete Article 22 of the European Directive on the duty of care, which was despised by the companies of the Competitiveness Roundtable and which required large companies to comply with the Paris Agreement:

On 13 November 2025, bolstered by this alliance with the far right, Jörgen Warborn shattered the cordon sanitaire with the adoption of all the amendments tabled jointly by the EPP and ECR through a union of the right and the far right.

This came as a real shock to the European institutions. 13 November 2025 marked a historic turning point: it was the first time in the history of the European Parliament that the right and the far right had legislated together against the rest of the chamber.

The mixing of genres in Washington D.C.

At the end of this parliamentary process, which raises fears for the future of European democracy, the Trump administration expressed its delight: White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt and US Secretary of Natural Resources Doug Burgum took to Twitter to celebrate the destruction of a pillar of the Green Deal under pressure from the United States.

Faced with such interference, a strong response was required in the name of democracy and European sovereignty.

But instead, Jörgen Warborn, in the midst of trilogue negotiations on his own text, travelled to Washington D.C. as president of SME Europe at the invitation of the International Democracy Union, an ultra-liberal conservative international association founded by George Bush and Margaret Thatcher in 1983… to which SME Europe is affiliated.

To date, we have been unable to determine who, among members of the Trump administration, Republican elected officials, or representatives of large American companies, whether or not they are members of the Competitiveness Roundtable, Jörgen Warborn met with during his stay in the American capital, while the fate of Omnibus I was still undecided. This situation is all the more worrying given that, upon his return from the United States, the trilogue concluded with an agreement modelled on the demands of the right-wing and far-right alliance, supported by American multinationals and the Trump administration, against the red lines of the European Commission and the Council. This meant the disappearance of Article 22 and the obligations for large companies to comply with the Paris Agreement and the European Union’s carbon neutrality objective.

The urgent need to suspend the Omnibus to protect democracy and European sovereignty

Given the seriousness of the facts presented, BLOOM expects the Advisory Committee on the Conduct of Members of the European Parliament to conduct a comprehensive internal investigation into the compatibility of Mr Warborn’s role as rapporteur and MEP with his other functions as a lobbyist for SME Europe.

In a context of unprecedented foreign pressure and the overturning of the world order by a fascist internationalism openly led by the Trump administration, BLOOM also calls on the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, to ensure full transparency on this matter, in particular by allowing the publication of all documents and correspondence exchanged between Mr Warborn and the foreign powers, companies and lobbies he met with prior to and during the Omnibus I legislative procedure. Transparency will make it possible to establish the factual extent of foreign interference in the European legislative process.

In the immediate term, the European Parliament must suspend the Omnibus legislative procedure, which is irreparably tainted by suspicion, in order to uphold the rule of law and protect European democracy.

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[1] The tabling of such amendments is all the more surprising given that in June 2023, during the parliamentary debate on the CS3D, Jörgen Warborn opposed the weakening or deletion of Article 22, demonstrating a complete change of position on this issue.