OLAF claims board ‘leaked secrets to press’

By David Cronin

Date: 10/03/05

OLAF, the EU's anti-fraud office, has complained that the board overseeing its activities might have leaked confidential information to the press, European Voice has learned.

The suggestion is contained in a letter written by OLAF's Director, Franz-Hermann Brüner, to Raymond Kendall, chairman of the OLAF supervisory committee.

The letter, sent in June last year, refers to a document in a file prepared for the Belgian authorities on Hans-Martin Tillack, a journalist with the German magazine Die Stern. Tillack was arrested by Brussels police in March 2004 on suspicion of bribing an OLAF official in return for classified information.

According to Brüner, Tillack obtained a copy of the document, which had been faxed to the Luxembourg office of the OLAF supervisory committee in May "with special precautions". Apart from the fax received by the committee, the only other copy of the document was "locked securely" in the office of a senior OLAF official, he added.

"I have expressed concern before about the possibility that confidential information supplied to your committee was reaching journalists, though on none of these occasions were the indications of a source close to the committee as strong [as in this case]", Brüner wrote.

Kendall yesterday (10 March) said that his committee was "a little upset" about Brüner's claims. "The allegations made against the secretariat were offensive because they were not supported by any real evidence," he added. "There was innuendo but no evidence."

A spokesman for Brüner declined to make any comment, apart from verifying that the letter was authentic.

In a separate development, Brüner has rejected allegations by EU Ombudsman Nikiforos Diamandouros that OLAF issued "incorrect or misleading information" about its probe into alleged bribery by Tillack.

In early February the ombudsman said that Brüner and another OLAF figure had given contradictory accounts of how the bribery claims had arisen. While Brüner had cited unnamed MEPs as sources, a top OLAF investigator Peter Baader later told the European Parliament's budget control committee he "had no idea" why the remark about receiving information from deputies was made.

Writing to Diamandouros earlier this week (8 March), Brüner said that several MEPs had told him in March 2002 that Tillack might have paid for OLAF papers. "Although these statements did not include concrete details, I nevertheless attributed to them a certain weight," he explained. "But in the light of the hearsay nature of the information, I did not prepare a note to the file and thus there was no indication in the official case file of this information."

Baader only took up his post in OLAF in November 2002. "Since these statements never became part of the case file, it is not surprising that Mr Baader had no first-hand knowledge of them," Brüner wrote.

A former prosecutor in Berlin and Munich, Brüner is currently seeking re-appointment for a second term with OLAF. Nice prosecutor Eric de Montgolfier is the highest profile rival applicant to emerge so far. Over the past six years, he has been trying to weed out corruption among the judiciary of the southern French city. His main achievement was in securing the resignation of Jean-Paul Renard, a judge who had accepted free holidays from figures known to have had brushes with the law.

Article reports that OLAF, the EU's anti-fraud office, complained that the board overseeing its activities might have leaked confidential information to the press. The suggestion was contained in a letter written by OLAF's Director, Franz-Hermann Brüner, to Raymond Kendall, chairman of the OLAF supervisory committee. The letter, sent in June last year, referred to a document in a file prepared for the Belgian authorities on Hans-Martin Tillack, a journalist with the German magazine 'Stern'. Tillack had been arrested by Brussels police in March 2004 on suspicion of bribing an OLAF official in return for classified information.

European Anti-Fraud Office: Press Release: OLAF/05/02 http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=OLAF/05/02&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

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