Publish OLAF report, says German MEP Inge Graessle

German MEP Inge Graessle has called on the Maltese courts to publish the OLAF report and that of the OLAF supervisory committee, into the investigation carried out on former Maltese European Commissioner John Dalli.

Dalli resigned on 16 October, 2012, over claims by OLAF that he may have known of an attempt to solicit a bribe from Swedish Match, in a bid to reverse the EU ban on the sale of snus.

Graessle, the European Parliament's rapporteur on OLAF's legal powers, has also called for the resignation of director Giovanni Kessler, over suggestions that OLAF asked witnesses to present the public and the European Parliament with a misleading version of events into the Dalli saga.

"We know that witnesses like Johann Gabrielsson of Swedish Match, were encouraged to maintain obviously wrong, factual statements, also before the Parliament. It appears that the purpose of this manoeuvre was to indirectly confirm the (wrong) statement of the director-general before the Budgetary Control Committee," Graessle said, writing in MaltaToday on Sunday 31 March, 2013.

"[Gabrielsson] described the course of events on 10 February 2012, how the bribe was supposedly asked in the private office of the Commissioner, while the Commissioner was in an adjoining room. In the meantime we have learned that this was a lie: by the way - influencing a witness into providing wrongful statements during an investigation is also a criminal offence. Because of all this, I have requested the resignation of the director-general."

Graessle has also called for the Maltese courts to publish the OLAF report and that of the supervisory committee's report into the way Kessler, who was personally involved in the investigation, carried out the Dalli inquiry.

"I am appalled to see now how the current director-general handles his plenitude of power, his responsibility, and his supervisory bodies - anything goes, unless it is explicitly prohibited...

"It is unacceptable that our own institution covers up the fact that it had been lied to all along. Do the on going judicial proceedings in Malta need these lies to be kept up? The Maltese judiciary could render an outstanding service to Europe by publishing, as it had announced originally, the OLAF report, and, while they are at it, the report of the OLAF Supervisory Committee as well," Graessle writes.

The MEP also says that the supervisory committee has also told MEPs of breaches of fundamental rights that took place in other OLAF investigations, as well as the Dalli case.

OLAF reportedly recruited third parties to assist in the Dalli investigations by instigating them to record telephone conversations without their subjects' knowledge, which Graessle says is illegal in Belgium.

"Has all this served the noble objective of the law? Did it answer whether Dalli instructed his friend to ask for money?

"We in Brussels - by now loyal readers of the Maltese press - will continue to follow this matter closely."