New EU Ombudsman must carry on transparency crusade against Big Tobacco lobbying

A decade after outgoing Emily O’Reilly’s transformative period in Brussels, the EU Parliament has elected the bloc’s new European Ombudsman for the next five years.

In the December 15 vote, Portuguese candidate Teresa Anginho won appeared She prevailed, with strong support from the dominant European People’s Party, helping the former human rights law professor to overcome rivals such as Julia Lafranc in Estonia, who campaigned on stripping away this crucial role of transparent and ethical policy-making.

It is encouraging that Ingenio has expressed an active approach to the EU watchdog’s position consistent with O’Reilly’s innovative and courageous protection of the bloc’s decision-making process from corporate interests and shadow pressures. Given a start date of 27 February, the new ombudsman will have a big job to fill, with the tobacco industry’s continued infiltration of vital public health policies, for example, calling for ambitious transparency boosts ahead of the next review of the EU’s tobacco control framework.

O’Reilly’s legacy of change

Since taking the reins in 2013, Emily O’Reilly, a former journalist, has taken on some of the EU’s most politically sensitive cases. From scrutinizing and emphasizing the mismanagement of the Commission’s conflict-of-interest investigation into former President Jose Manuel Barroso to exposing shortcomings in the procurement of the Covid-19 vaccine, O’Reilly has consistently refused to back down from challenging the bloc’s most powerful operators in its work. Actively seeking accountability and transparency.

One of O’Reilly’s most notable battles was against tobacco industry lobbying, with a series of scandals within the Commission marking her tenure and the broader policy-making climate. Indeed, taking office in the wake of the generation-defining Commission corruption saga, O’Reilly oversaw the post-2015 shift towards greater scrutiny of transparency. Last year alone, it twice ruled that the Committee’s failure to adhere to the transparency requirements of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control regarding reporting and documenting meetings with representatives of major tobacco companies constituted mismanagement.

The institutional weakness pointed out by O’Reilly is not just a simple administrative lapse, but a pressing public health threat that calls into question the EU’s ability to put the lives of its citizens above the interests of the tobacco industry – an unfortunate truth that the EU has dramatically exposed. The “Dalgate” scandal.

Uncover the truth behind ‘Dalligate’

In October 2012, just days before he was due to introduce an ambitious, anti-industry review of the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive (TPD), then EU Health Commissioner John Daley was forced to resign in the wake of €60 million in cash. – An influence scheme involving Snus manufacturer Swedish Match and Maltese businessman Silvio Zammit, a personal associate of Dali. In short, Zammit leveraged his connections with Daly to obtain this bribe from Match’s Swedish lobbyist, Gayle Kimberley, in exchange for dropping the TPD’s retail ban.

Despite Daly’s insistence to the contrary, the EU Fraud Office’s subsequent investigation into the case concluded that “unambiguous and converging circumstantial evidence” suggested that he “was aware of this attempted bribery” and failed to intervene. In light of these results, then Commission President José Manuel Barroso requested Dali’s resignation.

This was not the end of the case, as the OLAF report “opens more questions than it provides answers,” according to former MEP Enneborg Grassl, an assessment in which civil society leaders in the bloc participated. The lobbying NGO, the European Corporate Observatory (CEO), found that OLAF provided “no direct evidence that Daly was… aware” of Zammit’s overtures to SwedishMatch, arguing that the anti-fraud office appeared to have “combined arguments in a false sense.” Selectively” against Daly, “without regard to the credibility of witnesses.”

These initial concerns about the integrity of the OLAF investigation have been validated, with the revelation of questionable investigative practices by former director Giovanni Kessler. In June, the Brussels Court of Appeal upheld Kessler’s ruling on charges of illegal wiretapping on Zammit, while Kessler testified that Barroso had ordered the investigation – the key exoneration of Daly.

As former MEP José Bove, who directed the recent film “Dalligate,” noted, “The fact that Mr. Dalli was fired so quickly, without any legal basis, shows that the tobacco companies wanted to buy more time by postponing” the TPD law. review. Convinced of Dalí’s innocence and political targeting, Bovey received recorded confessions from two Swedish Match employees admitting to fabricating allegations at OLAF’s request to “legitimize” Dalí’s overthrow.

Continuing threats to Big Tobacco

As the chief executive warned a year after Dallygate’s collapse, the Barroso Commission, keen to “keep it under wraps”, made “no effort… to learn the lessons and try to prevent something similar from happening again”.

While the 2014 TPD revision mandated plain packaging and a ban on menthol cigarettes, Big Tobacco achieved a massive victory in securing the removal of the WHO FCTC protocol to eliminate illicit trade in tobacco products and provide an industry-independent track and trace system. This glaring omission has been significantly facilitated by the fact that the WHO Protocol, drafted in 2012, has not yet received the 40 ratifications needed to enter into force, providing the Commission with justification to drop this vital measure from the TPD and open the door to a system that Controlled by industry partners.

Several years later, this is exactly what happened when the EU executive awarded track-and-trace contracts to the likes of Swiss companies Dentsu Tracking and Inexto, heirs to the widely condemned Codentify system developed by Philip Morris International (PMI). Inexto has long promoted Codentify – which it acquired from the tobacco industry in 2016 – as an independent, WHO-compliant system; While Dentsu, owner of Blue Infinity, co-developer of Codentify, controversially won its role in the EU system without a public tender.

As with Gayle Kimberley of the Dallygate scandal, Dentsu failed to register on the Commission’s transparency register while lobbying the Commission, and only did so last spring amid European Parliament scrutiny. This significant transparency oversight is particularly concerning given that Jan Hoffmann, a former Commission official working on tobacco traceability, accepted the position of Director of Regulatory Affairs and Compliance at Dentsu shortly after it won the contract.

A crucial moment for EU transparency

Given the industry’s upcoming TPD review, the Commission no longer has an excuse to repeat the same mistakes. With the WHO Protocol entering into force since September 2018, the EU must respect its higher legal obligations and implement a truly independent system to tackle the bloc’s growing illicit tobacco trade – a fact confirmed by research funded by Big Tobacco that confirms the failure of the system. European Union.

Last year, a group of proactive MEPs offered hope for change, questioning the Commission about the transparency failings that enabled Dentsu to make the murky selection and publish a white paper with leading tobacco control research institutions and NGOs, including the University of Bath and The Smoke. . Free Partnership (SFP), which exposes the industry’s undue influence on track and trace and other key tobacco control policies. In the crucial months ahead, O’Reilly rightly emphasized the crucial role these MEPs play in ensuring proper oversight of the EU executive, warning that “if it comes down to me or my successor… it will be a challenge.”

New Ombudsman Teresa Angiho faces the task of upholding and expanding O’Reilly’s legacy. With scandals like Dallgate exposing the tobacco industry’s disturbing influence over EU policy-making, Ingenio must work decisively with like-minded MEPs to promote transparency and ensure ethical governance within the Commission to prevent further erosion of public health and confidence in Europe.

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