Yeah.

And this interview was done like earlier this year.

And I mean, you have to understand that for these companies that are expected to handle all this new legislation, it's not super easy, right? To just sit around and wait what happens.

Because what might happen is that you have to be ready December 26 and just be able to have your guys ready to upload all the stuff into the IT system because from then on, well, you have to because it's the law.

Or otherwise, well, it might also be postponed again.

And then what? Then you have this guy sitting around in December 1st doing nothing.

For companies, this is not an easy thing, I guess.

How do you feel this fits into that wider file? Is it for you, ah, just another example of a pattern I see over and over again? Is there a difference?

Uh, so far, now we've been talking quite a lot about US companies, but I'm curious what, how did the European companies look at this law and at the simplification?

It's a bit of a mixed bag in the sense that, yes, there are, um, mainly the energy intensive chemical fossil companies, um, uh, that, that al- they, they were arguing for the simplification from the beginning.

So it's not only US lobby.

Um, but what's very important is that there's a lot of other big companies in Europe, like Nestle, but also like Unilever, uh, and, um, IKEA, Aldi.

So that, that's not, that's not small companies, right? They were als- all very surprised by this simplification drive because they already started investing in cleaning up their supply chains.

Then all of a sudden you don't have to? So that makes no sense from an economic view.

And they told me basically like, "Look, um, we are, we started investing a whole lot of money in, in doing this, in making sure that our cocoa farms in Ghana are not, you know, there's no slavery on the plantation or, or whatever." You, you start cleaning up your supply chain and investing in that under the assumption that this then will be, uh, something all your competitors also have to do.

But then I think the big question that remains is why did the commission, why did the EU at least partly give into those US demands?