Dalli case has 'special handling' status to security-vet MEPs before reading report

MEPs from the European Parliament's budgetary control committee have said European Commission chief Josè Manuel Barroso, in a letter to EP president Martin Schulz on 30 October, said he is legally bound to withhold the OLAF report on John Dalli.

German Liberal MEP Michael Theurer, the head of the budget control committee, told EUobserver on Wednesday (7 November) that political groups have asked parliament Schulz to "insist" on "full access" to a report by the EU's anti-fraud office, OLAF, on why the former health commissioner lost his job.

"It's not a question of the commission refusing access to the report, it's a question of the commission fulfilling its legal obligations," Barroso's spokeswoman, Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen, told this website.

OLAF interviewed Dalli, formerly EU commission for health and consumer affairs, twice on allegations that a middleman tried to solicit a bribe from tobacco firm Swedish Match and that Dalli's lawyer came to one of the OLAF meetings.

Barroso added that he first spoke with Dalli on the subject on 25 July and again on 16 October.

The Maltese attorney general, who has passed on the OLAF case to the police, told EUobserver in a written statement that Malta's criminal code only allows access to documents "once the investigation... has been concluded" and that there is no fixed time frame for police to complete their work.

The OLAF report can be handed to MEPs as long as it complies with regulation 45/2001 on protection of personal data and so long as it is "necessary or legally required on important public interest grounds", a spokesperson for the anti-fraud unit said.

But the report is classified as "OLAF special handling" - a unique designation which falls outside EU Council rules on confidential papers, such as making sure that MEPs are security-vetted by their home countries' intelligence services before gaining access.

Tuesday's hearing also saw members of OLAF's supervisory board shed light on procedural irregularities in the case.

The board is the only oversight body on OLAF's work. But its new head, Belgian special police chief Johan Denolf, complained to MEPs that it got the Dalli report only after it had been forwarded to Commission secretary-general Catherine Day. He added that Day got to see the full text, while the board got a redacted version with some content blacked out.

"If the EU's data protection supervisor says these details should be suppressed, then how come Day gets to see it but the OLAF board does not?" committee chair Theurer noted.

Meanwhile, the former head of the OLAF oversight team, ex-EU-judge Christiaan Timmermans, who resigned from his OLAF board top post shortly after Dalli lost his job, told MEPs he did it for "personal reasons."