Bilderberg’s media team says it hopes a conference will take place in 2021.
The annual Bilderberg Meeting, in which western elites rub shoulders and discuss major issues facing Europe and North America, will not take place in 2020, marking the first year without such a conference in more than four decades.
In 1976, Bilderberg planners canceled the annual meeting amid an international bribery scandal that involved a founding organizer of the conference, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Bernhard served as chair of the Bilderberg conference from its founding in 1954 to 1976, according to the Royal House of the Netherlands.
Bernhard, who served as inspector general of the Dutch armed forces, accepted more than $1 million from Lockheed, the predecessor of American aerospace and defense company Lockheed Martin. The more encompassing Lockheed bribery scandals consisted of company officials making a series of bribes to representatives of foreign governments over the span of two decades in order to ensure the sale of Lockheed’s aircrafts.
This year, no scandal surfaced the would tarnish the Bilderberg Meeting. Rather, the Bilderberg conference will not take place in 2020 as a result of coronavirus measures.
In March, Bilderberg organizers announced the 2020 meeting had been postponed. The group’s official website still states the meeting is postponed, but the Bilderberg media team confirmed to FreeManPost that a conference will not occur in 2020.
Currently, it is unclear whether a Bilderberg meeting will take place in 2021, though the group has expressed hope there will be one.
“While there won’t be a Bilderberg meeting in 2020, we hope to be able to have one in 2021,” the Bilderberg media team stated in an email to FreeManPost earlier this month.
In a follow up email, the media team said it “will publish the date and venue of the 2021 Bilderberg Meeting as soon as we can.”
Additionally, it is unclear whether the location and participants of the planned 2020 meeting — neither of which the group released to the public — would remain the same if a Bilderberg conference were to occur in 2021.
The Bilderberg group has not stated whether or not it may hold a virtual conference. In March, however, the Bilderberg media team indicated conference organizers aimed for participants to meet in-person in 2020.
“We hope to be able to have a Bilderberg Meeting in the typical format later this year and will make an announcement about the location and date as soon as this is possible,” the Bilderberg media team stated in a March email to FreeManPost.
Conversely, the World Economic Forum (WEF), which holds a similarly high-level yet much more public annual conference in Davos, Switzerland, has announced a new format for its gathering that normally takes place in January.
In Jan. 2021, the WEF will hold a digital conference called “Davos Dialogues,” which will mark the rollout of the organization’s “Great Reset” initiative. The WEF is calling for a reset of the global economy in the aftermath of the current pandemic.
Meanwhile, the WEF has tentatively rescheduled its annual conference to May 18-21 at the Burgenstock resort overlooking Lake Lucerne by Lucerne, Switzerland. The WEF stated in an October press release that, if it occurs, the May 2021 conference will combine in-person and digital elements. The meeting in Lucerne will take place so long as conditions guaranteeing the health and safety of participants and the host community can be met, the WEF announced.
The much more secretive Bilderberg meetings have, in recent years, taken place in May or June. Bilderberg meetings predominantly draw elites from Europe and North America. The annual meetings are held a majority of the time in European countries. The group also holds meetings in the United States and Canada.
Discussions held at Bilderberg meetings are closed to the public, and rules call for journalists who attend the conference not to report on what takes place.
The 2017, 2018 and 2019 Bilderberg meetings were held respectively in the United States, Italy and Switzerland. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attended part of the 2019 meeting in Montreux, as did Jared Kushner, the advisor and son-in-law of President Donald Trump.
Over the past several years, regular participants in Bilderberg meetings have included former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former CIA director David Petraeus, former Google chief Eric Schmidt, Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg and former European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
Critics have alleged the Bilderberg group is an organization of kingmakers that catapults certain conference participants up the political ladders of their respective countries or international bodies.
In 2019 alone, past Bilderberg participants Ursula von der Leyen, Kristalina Georgieva, Christine Lagarde and Charles Michel respectively became heads of the European Commission, International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Council. Additionally, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who is a former participant, became prime minister of Greece last year.