The European Parliament’s budgetary control committee is to invite the European Commission’s most senior official to appear to discuss allegations that led to the resignation of John Dalli as Malta’s European commissioner.
Catherine Day, the Commission’s secretary-general, will be asked about the allegations against Dalli that she passed on to the European Union’s anti-fraud office, OLAF. The allegations – that Silvio Zammit, a lobbyist, was claiming that he could influence the commissioner – were made by Swedish Match, a tobacco company. Earlier this month, Malta’s police commissioner announced that there was not sufficient evidence to justify bringing criminal charges against Dalli.
The parliamentary committee will also invite Paola Testori Coggi, the Commission’s director-general for health and consumers, to attend a committee hearing. MEPs want to question her about how the Commission’s proposal to revise tobacco legislation was drafted.
Kessler under attack
On Tuesday (18 June), Giovanni Kessler, the head of OLAF, defended his office’s investigation of Dalli, which has been criticised both by MEPs and by OLAF’s supervisory committee. He was questioned about OLAF’s methods, particularly its use of telephone evidence, and about his decision to have lunch with one of the witnesses, Gayle Kimberley, a consultant working for Swedish Match.
Asked whether if he had the chance again, he would do anything differently, Kessler said he would not. OLAF was the victim of false allegations and fabricated documents, he said. “If I would be influenced by this, I would myself contribute to destroying the independence of OLAF,” he said.
Asked by French centre-right MEP Jean-Pierre Audy whether, if the European Parliament passed a resolution against him, he would step down from OLAF, he said that he would not. To do so, he said, would be to undermine the independence of OLAF.
However, Ingeborg Grässle, a German MEP who leads for the centre-right European People’s Party on the budgetary control committee, told European Voice that she expected to submit such a resolution to a vote, after the Parliament’s summer break. That was, she said, the direction in which the Dalli affair was going.
? Joseph Muscat, Malta’s centre-left prime minister, announced this week that he was appointing Dalli to lead reform of the country’s main public hospital.
Muscat said he had waited to make the appointment until it was clear that Dalli would not be facing charges from the EU lobbying scandal. He added that he did not expect the appointment to cause any problems with the European Commission.
Before becoming a European commissioner, Dalli was finance minister, health and social policy minister, and foreign affairs minister in successive centre-right governments.