Does the EU have a problem with wealthy donors? I've heard this criticism levelled against US politicians and it's justified, but in this case I think it might just be sheer ignorance on the part of the EU legislators.
But there are many, many lobbyists active in the EU, and some of them have a surprising amount of influence over politicians. There has even been a case where two different parties, independently from each other, introduced the exact same bill, which had been written by a lobbyist.
There's lots of dark international money slushing around out there that happens to make it into someone's wife's friend's company.
The leverage they use is their relationships with other politicians to engage in vote trading.
In the current case this is done because the industry interest groups backing the legislation are predominantly European content rights owners. Whereas the interest groups opposing the legislation appear mostly organised by non-EU groups, and therefore thus are less of a concern for EU legislators, and potentially don’t have the same kind of immediate access to them.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_cash_for_influence_scan...