Special chefs are a meeting of a member of each cabinet (for a certain area), the legal service and the secretariat general. They perform last minute preparations to proposed laws before they go before the College of Commissioners, but they are a "political equivalent of a College of Cardinals" with a great degree of cloak and dagger work.
The most "special" of these is the group for inter-institutional relations (formerly Parliamentary affairs) as it provides the Commission with an early warning on what the European Parliament is thinking - before it rejects the Commission's proposals. The most astute civil servants get sent to these meetings.
The heads of cabinets meet weekly in the "Hebdo" - the most important meeting of European Civil Servants who direct the work of the Commission and the Commissioners.
Read more about this topic: Cabinet (European Commission)
Famous quotes containing the word special:
“An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for a strict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)