Ousted European Health Official Faces Questions About Plans to Transfer Money
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Version 0 of 1. BRUSSELS — When the European Union’s top health official, John Dalli, was forced by senior officials to resign this past fall, he was under investigation in a corruption case involving the solicitation of a nearly $80 million kickback from the tobacco industry. But the way the case wrapped up was to almost no one’s satisfaction. Some European officials were frustrated that the case had not gone further. And Mr. Dalli, who strenuously denied any wrongdoing, complained that he was being railroaded out with no direct evidence against him. The lingering mystery around Mr. Dalli has now deepened, however. Even while he was being investigated in the tobacco case last summer, he took at least two trips to the Bahamas as part of an effort to arrange the transfer of tens of millions of dollars. Those trips, and their aim, were confirmed by one of his hosts in the islands — and by Mr. Dalli himself. In an interview on Friday, he said he was facilitating the transfer of a huge sum to a charitable project “to help people in Africa.” Calling the project very personal and confidential, he would not discuss its details. But he insisted that nothing unseemly was going on. He said that he personally had no accounts in the Bahamas, that he was not being paid and that the money was not for him, but rather would be put into a trust for the charity. But when contacted by reporters, officials at the European Anti-Fraud Office, more commonly known by its French acronym OLAF, said that they had not known about a Bahamas trip he took July 7-8 and that the office would look into the matter. And they suggested the office could reopen a wider investigation into Mr. Dalli’s activities while he was the European commissioner for health and consumer protection. “As is usual practice, OLAF will duly consider any relevant new evidence, within its remit of competence,” the office said in a statement sent by e-mail over the weekend. The original accusations surrounding Mr. Dalli’s ouster in October, and the sums of money involved, represent the most serious case the European Commission has had to contend with in years, although the European Parliament has been marked by recent cases of abuse of power and corruption. The case came to the authorities’ attention when the tobacco company Swedish Match reported to the commission in May 2012 that a Maltese entrepreneur, Silvio Zammit, had asked for nearly $80 million in return for using his contacts with Mr. Dalli, who is also Maltese. In its report, Swedish Match included a recording of one of the requests for money made by Mr. Zammit to a tobacco lobbyist. The aim, officials suspected, was to influence a legislative proposal on tobacco products — and in particular to seek an end to the ban on sales of snus, tobacco sold in small pouches and placed between the gum and lip, that covers all countries in the bloc except for Sweden. Mr. Dalli, in the recent telephone interview, said he knew Mr. Zammit from his earlier career in Maltese politics but denied that they were close or ever business partners. He said Mr. Zammit worked as a political canvasser. “He was simply one of the helpers in an election campaign, and I have hundreds of them,” he said. After the complaint by Swedish Match, the commission asked the antifraud office to investigate. José Manuel Barroso, the commission’s president, received the office’s report on Oct. 15 and presented Mr. Dalli with some of the findings at a meeting the next day. He then gave Mr. Dalli no choice but to resign, according to Mr. Dalli. The antifraud office closed its inquiry shortly before Mr. Dalli resigned in the fall, and then gave its final report to the Maltese authorities, who started their own investigation. The Maltese police, however, said in early June this year that they had found no evidence of wrongdoing and signaled that they had no reason to continue investigating, according to the Maltese news media. Starting on July 7, Mr. Dalli took the first of his trips to the Bahamas, he said. One of his hosts on a later trip, Barry Connor, a Bahamas resident who rented Mr. Dalli’s family a villa, said he recalled being told by Mr. Dalli that he planned to transfer “large amounts” of money for an unspecified venture. “Normally, you get some people coming here with some sort of a scheme, and they’ve got investors and they’re all going to do this and do that,” Mr. Connor said. But he said Mr. Dalli and his guests seemed different. “No, they just had money coming, and they were going to invest it into charities.” But even as the tobacco investigation was under way, Mr. Dalli’s travels went undisclosed. One European Commission official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the issue, said Mr. Dalli worked to conceal the trip from European officials by calling them to say he was spending that weekend in Malta with his family. In an interview with Malta Today published on Monday, Mr. Dalli restated that the intent of that Bahamas trip, and one later that summer, was a voluntary charitable effort. He denied that he had hidden the trip, saying he had openly informed his cabinet about it. He rejected any idea that the travel and the original tobacco case were linked. He criticized a report published on Monday in The International Herald Tribune about the Bahamas trip, calling it part of a political conspiracy to damage his reputation. And he noted that the timing of the revelations about his travel could not have been coincidental: He suggested that some European officials had leaked suspicions about the trip in order to weaken an effort this week in the European Parliament to place new limits on the antifraud office, OLAF. The case against Mr. Dalli last year raised considerable complaints among some members of the European Parliament that OLAF was abusing its mandate. In a statement at the time, Ingeborg Grässle, a German member of the European Parliament, called the case a “gross misallocation of resources.” Ms. Grässle has called for the director general of the antifraud office, Giovanni Kessler, to be suspended, and on Monday she reiterated a call to empower a committee to do more to supervise the office. That initiative, along with a new rule book for the office, is to be put up for a vote in the European Parliament on Wednesday. European Commission officials have stood by the office’s conduct, and say that Mr. Barroso had no choice but to push Mr. Dalli to leave on Oct. 16. They say that the investigation made it appear likely that Mr. Dalli at least knew about efforts to secure a huge kickback from Swedish Match, and that his departure was necessary to protect the commission’s credibility and its anti-tobacco legislation, which was under review at the time. Mr. Dalli insists the accusations made against him in Brussels were part of what he described as an elaborate effort to entrap him, led by the smokeless tobacco industry. He suggested the aim was to bring down the bloc’s top health official and manipulate legislation. And he reserved scathing criticism for the antifraud office’s conduct. “There was a complete setup by the tobacco industry that OLAF didn’t even — didn’t even — attempt to investigate,” Mr. Dalli said. “They tried to construct a case around something to prove that something happened where nothing in fact happened.” |