There is some controversy surrounding Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen's minutes from a Bilderberg Club meeting in 2003, during which many of the world's influential men and women met in lodge-type secrecy to privately discuss solutions to issues of the moment.

There are Bilderberg Club meetings each year, but not necessarily with the same participants.

Despite the fact that taxpayers paid the bill for Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen's participation in the meeting, which was held at the Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles in France that year, the prime minister has repeatedly refused to discuss the contents of the meeting, and it now appears that the minutes of the meeting have disappeared.

"Neither the prime minister nor the ministry have the minutes any more," the prime minister says.

Convenient
The Unity List Parliamentary Deputy Chairman Per Clausen, however, has demanded an explanation, saying that it seems 'convenient' that the minutes have disappeared.

"We know that the Bilderberg participants are under a rule of confidentiality, so it's rather convenient when we ask for information that that the minutes have disappeared. It seems very strange," Clausen says.

Although the Bilderberg Club claims to invite people in their private and not official capacities, the prime minister has maintained that he was invited as Denmark's prime minister.

Bilderberg
The first Bilderberg meeting was held in 1954 at the Hotel de Bilderberg in the Netherlands and was convened by among others Joseph Retinger, a proponent of European unification. The idea of the annual meetings was to create a network of influential political and industrial leaders in order to discuss problems of the time. The first meeting was called to address what was seen as a growing anti-Americanism in Europe.

Since then meetings have been held in various places - more recently in Istanbul in 2007 and in Chantilly in the United States this year.

The current chairman of Bilderberg is Étienne Davignon of Belgium, a businessman and former vice-president of the European Commission.

In 2007, reports say that Anders Eldrup of DONG Energy took part in the meeting in Istanbul, as did Ulrik Federspiel of the Danish Foreign Ministry and Mogens Lykketoft of the Danish Social Democrats.

There are currently no immediate details on who took part in the 2008 Bilderberg meeting in Chantilly, Virginia on June 8.

The meeting was billed as a conference to deal mainly with a nuclear free world, cyber terrorism, Africa, Russia, finance, protectionism, US-EU relations, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Islam and Iran. There were reported to be some 140 participants, with two-thirds coming from Europe.

The 2003 meeting at which Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was present, was also attended by Anders Eldrup of DONG, Mogens Lykketoft - who at the time was Chairman of the Social Democratic Party and Editor-in-Chief Tøger Seidenfaden of Politiken. Among issues reportedly discussed at the meeting were globalization, regionalism, Iraq and post-war Iraq as well as discussions about trade agreements.