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Commission under fire over tobacco lobbying

Green MEPs say they are not happy with Commission’s responses since resignation of John Dalli.

Members of the European Parliament have challenged the European Commission to explain its various contacts with the tobacco industry, and are urging the Parliament to set up a special committee of inquiry.

José Bové and Bart Staes, two Green MEPs, said they were not satisfied with the Commission’s answers to questions posed by the Parliament’s budgetary control committee after the resignation in October of John Dalli, the European commissioner for health and consumer policy, in a scandal over lobbying on tobacco.

Amid the answers, which were sent to the Parliament in December, the Commission discloses that three meetings took place between tobacco lobbyists and a member of the private office of José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission. Others took place with officials from the office of Catherine Day, the Commission’s secretary-general. Further details of meetings emerged in a response from the Commission to questions posed under freedom of information procedures by Corporate Europe Observatory, a transparency campaign group.

The World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which the EU has signed up to, says that in setting their public health policies on tobacco control, public authorities “shall act to protect these policies from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry”. The WHO’s guidelines on implementing this rule say that records of interactions with the tobacco industry should be disclosed to the public. But the meetings disclosed by the Commission in its response to the Parliament had not previously been revealed.

Bové said: “Rules have been put in place that are binding [in the] Convention on Tobacco Control, which says that you cannot have relationships that are under the table. All EU member states have signed up to this. There are clear rules, and those rules have not been applied.”

Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen, Barroso’s spokesperson, said the Commission had complied with the WHO guidelines.

“We have been extremely transparent in all of the information we provided,” she said.

Dalli’s resignation followed an investigation by the EU’s anti-fraud office, OLAF, which found that Dalli was aware that a Maltese businessman had solicited tobacco company Swedish Match for payment in exchange for influencing the tobacco legislation. But the investigation uncovered no evidence that Dalli was involved with the offer. The Commission has not shared the OLAF report with MEPs.

As part of the answers to MEPs’ questions, the Commission disclosed that Michel Petite, a former head of the Commission’s legal service, now working for Clifford Chance, a law firm that numbers Philip Morris among its clients, had discussed tobacco legislation with Commission officials. He spoke to Patrick Hetsch, deputy director-general in the legal service, in September 2011, and Marc Van Hoof, a principal legal adviser, in September 2012. The Commission’s note to the Parliament says: “After having been informed about these conversations, Director-General Luis Romero [the current head of the Commission’s legal service] asked to be personally updated by Mr Petite of his legal counsel activities in this area. That meeting took place on 14 November 2012.”

On 12 December, Petite was re-appointed as a member of a three-person ethics committee that advises Barroso on possible conflicts of interest that might arise from positions or jobs taken up by European commissioners after leaving office. German centre-right MEP Ingeborg Grässle said the re-appointment of Petite was “an impossible act”. Bové called it a “scandal”.

Ahrenkilde Hansen insisted that Petite’s conversations were of a purely legal nature and that the ethics-committee post “does not deal with any subject which is linked to the tobacco directive”.

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