UPDATED  The European Commission should act on the alleged breach of human rights committed by the EU Anti Fraud Agency (OLAF) in its Dalligate investigation, according to a member of the agency’s watchdog.

The German member of the Supervisory Committee Herbert Bosch said: “if there are infringements of human rights it is time for the Commission as the guardian of the EU Treaties and the protection of human rights, to take action.

He was answering a question by centre-right MEP Inge Graessle at a hearing of the Budgetary Committee, which is responsible to oversee the anti-fraud agency.

Dr Graessle asked why the Supervisory Committee why these concerns were not passed on to a judicial authority for action to be taken against OLAF.

Mr Bosch said the Supervisory Committee had sent its opinion on the Dalli case to the stakeholders, including the European Commission, which, he urged to take action.

However, in a separate hearing yesterday, it emerged that the responsible Commissioner Algirdas Semeta had not been given a copy of the Supervisory Committee on Dalligate.

Earlier in today's committee meeting, OLAF  was accused by its watchdog of being reluctant to give access to its case files for scrutiny and that the agency even often gave “doctored” information or information which had been “cleaned up”.

The statement came from Catherine Pignon, a member of the Supervisory Committee, whose task it is to scrutinise OLAF particularly for potential breaches of procedure and the human rights of suspects. She was speaking at a hearing of the European Parliament’s Budget Control Committee, which is responsible to oversee the anti-fraud agency.

“Today we still received information that is limited or “doctored” or cleaned up in some way. And this does not help us to get a full picture of the situation to our satisfaction,” Ms Pignon said.

Most of the questions being raised at the meeting, which is still in progress, revolve around the Dalligate investigation  after the agency concluded there was “unambiguous circumstantial evidence” showing that he knew that his former canvasser Silvio Zammit had asked for a bribe of €60 million to lift a ban on snus – a form of tobacco consumed orally which can only be sold in Sweden under current EU legislation.

Over the past months serious questions were raised about the legality of some of the investigative actions adopted by OLAF in its probe on Mr Dalli.

In an opinion issued specifically on the Dalligate investigation, the Supervisory Committee questioned whether OLAF had the right to obtain from the Maltese authorities the phone records of Mr Zammit. The committee also questioned whether OLAF had the remit to instruct Snus lobbyist Inge Delfosse to record a conversation with Mr Zammit in which she tried to ask questions that would entrap the Sliema restaurateur into admitting that the money he was asking for would go to Mr Dalli.

In fact, Mr Zammit did not provide such evidence in this conversation and OLAF ended up not using any transcript from it but the supervisory committee suggested that this recorded phone call may have been illegal because there was no warrant covering it.

Speaking at the hearing this morning, Ms Pignon said that the recording of a conversation as part of an investigation should be covered by a specific legal basis, empowering the agency to take such action.

“Where there is none it would be tantamount to a breach of Article 7 of the Charter of Fundamental Human Rights and we did not find a legal basis for this action,” she said.

The central complaint of the committee, however, revolved around Mr Kessler’s apparent reluctance to give the watchdog full access to information on the Dalligate probe even though he later acceded to it.

The head of the EU’s anti-fraud agency (OLAF) defended himself from claims that suspects’ human rights had been breached during the investigation on the Dalligate affair saying this was an issue for the courts to decide.An impassioned Giovanni Kessler told a hearing of the Budget Control Commission, which oversees the agency, that any questions on violations of human rights had to be judged by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

“If we have been committed crimes, these have to be decided by an institution,” he said, arguing that the strength of the OLAF investigation on the case was being tested in the Maltese courts while any claims of human rights breaches during OLAF’s probe should be dealt with in the ECJ.

Mr Kessler also denied that OLAF had withheld information from the supervisory committee, saying that the claim was defamatory.

They were the only comments directly addressing these issue on Dalligate because he was cut short by the Committee’s Chairman Michael Theurer asked him to round up.

See OLAF final report below.

 

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