Knives out in the Breydel

Date: 19/09/1996

The case of the leaked document has added a bit of spice to the mad cow inquiry now under way at the European Parliament.

The special committee of Euro MPs which is trying to find out what was known about BSE when and by whom - and what, if anything, was done about it and when and why and how - has been a bit upstaged by the much more intense investigation going on inside the Breydel to establish who spilled the beans about the mad cow memo by agriculture Director-General Guy Legras.

In case you missed it, Legras wrote a memo in 1993 suggesting it was best not to make a fuss about the public health dangers of BSE because of the impact on the beef market.

He was right about the market, but the idea that the public should be kept in the dark has embarrassed the entire Commission.

Now the knives are out all over DGVI.

Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler is furious at the damage done to the Commission's image and it does not take a plumber to know that stopping a leak is impossible until the source has been found.

Could the answer reside in an accusatory one-and-a-half page letter received by the Commission's security office two days after the offending memo appeared in print?

The anonymous document (signed by “friends of Gilbert Castille, Fernando Mansito, Guy Legras and Christine Reicharts”) speaks of a breach of Article 17 of internal staff regulations, the one prohibiting the dissemination of information gathered during the course of Commission work.

Then it names names before admitting that its allegations are supposition based on circumstantial evidence.

The leak is in danger of turning into a smear ... still, it makes a change for a press corps tired of writing about m*d c*w d**ea*e.