Table of Contents
After a decade of Emily O’Reilly’s transformative tenure in Brussels, the EU Parliament has chosen the bloc’s new European Ombudsman for the next five years.
The December 15 elections featured Portuguese candidate Teresa Anjinho arose triumphant, with strong support from the dominant EPP that helped the former human rights professor get past rivals like Estonia’s Julia Laffranque, who had campaigned to reduce this crucial role for transparent, ethical policymaking.
Encouragingly, Anjinho has expressed an activist approach to the EU watchdog’s position, in line with O’Reilly’s innovative, courageous protection of the bloc’s decision-making from corporate interests and shadow lobbying. Looking ahead to her start date on February 27, the new Ombudsman will have big shoes to fill, for example dealing with the tobacco industry’s ruthless infiltration of vital public health policy, calling for ambitious transparency improvements ahead of the upcoming review of the EU’s tobacco control framework.
O’Reilly’s legacy of change
Since taking over in 2013, Emily O’Reilly, a former journalist, has taken on some of the EU’s most politically sensitive cases. From investigating and confirming the mismanagement of the Commission’s conflict of interest investigation into former President José Manuel Barroso to exposing shortcomings in the procurement of COVID-19 vaccines, O’Reilly has consistently refused to involve the bloc’s most powerful actors to challenge her country. relentless quest for accountability and transparency.
One of O’Reilly’s most notable battles was against the tobacco industry lobby, with a series of scandals within the Commission marking her tenure and the wider policy environment. Taking office in the wake of a generation-defining Commission corruption saga, O’Reilly has overseen the post-2015 shift toward better transparency investigations. In the past year alone, she has twice ruled that the Commission’s failure to adhere to WHO FCTC transparency requirements regarding reporting and documenting meetings with Big Tobacco representatives constituted maladministration.
The institutional weakness pointed out by O’Reilly is more than just an administrative error, but represents an urgent 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 places – an unfortunate truth dramatically exposed by the ‘Dalligate’ scandal.
Uncovering the truth behind ‘Dalligate’
In October 2012, just days before he planned to table an ambitious, anti-industry review of the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive (TPD), then EU Health Commissioner John Dalli was forced to resign after a cash deposit of 60 million euros. influence program involving snus manufacturer Swedish Match and Maltese businessman Silvio Zammit, a personal associate of Dalli. In short, Zammit took advantage of his connections to Dalli to solicit these bribes from Swedish Match lobbyist Gayle Kimberely, in exchange for dropping the TPD’s snus retail ban.
Despite Dalli’s claims to the contrary, the EU Anti-Fraud Office’s (OLAF) subsequent investigation into the matter concluded that “unequivocal and converging circumstantial evidence” suggested that he was “aware of this bribery attempt” and not intervened. In light of these findings, then Commission President José Manuel Barroso called for Dalli’s resignation.
The OLAF report is hardly the end of the matter, but “raises more questions than it…answers,” according to former German MEP Ineborg Grässle, a judgment shared by the bloc’s civil society leaders. Lobbying watchdog NGO Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) found that OLAF “provided no direct evidence that Dalli was aware” of Zammit’s overtures to Swedish Match, ruling that the anti-fraud agency had apparently “selectively assembled arguments” against Dalli: “without to take into account the credibility of witnesses.”
These initial concerns about the integrity of the OLAF investigation have now been confirmed, with the questionable investigative practices of former director Giovanni Kessler coming to light. In June, a Brussels appeals court upheld its ruling against Kessler for his illegal wiretapping of Zammit, while Kessler testified that Barroso ordered the investigation – a key vindication for Dalli.
As former French MP José Bové, who directed the recent ‘Dalligate’ film, has noted: “The fact that Mr Dalli was thrown out so quickly, without any legal basis, shows that the tobacco companies wanted to buy more time by to postpone TPD.” revision. Convinced of Dalli’s innocence and political purpose, Bové even received recorded confessions from two Swedish Match employees, in which they admitted that they had fabricated charges at OLAF’s request to ‘legitimize’ Dalli’s ouster.
Big Tobacco’s Continued Threats
As the CEO warned a year after Dalligate went bankrupt, Barroso’s Commission, keen to ‘sweep it under the carpet’, had ‘made no effort… to learn 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 scored a monumental victory in securing the removal of the WHO FCTC protocol to eliminate the illicit trade in tobacco products and the industry-independent track and trace -system. This glaring omission was particularly facilitated by the fact that the WHO Protocol, drawn up in 2012, had not yet achieved the forty ratifications necessary to enter into force, providing the Commission with justification for removing this crucial measure from the TPD deleted and opened the door to a system managed by industrial partners.
A few years later, this is exactly what happened when the EU administrator awarded track-and-trace contracts to the Swiss companies Dentsu Tracking and Inexto, the heirs of the widely condemned Codentify system developed by Philip Morris International (PMI). Inexto has long falsely promoted Codentify – which it acquired from the tobacco industry in 2016 – as an independent and WHO-compliant system; while Dentsu, owner of Codentify co-developer Blue Infinity, controversially won its role in the EU system without a public tender.
Like Gayle Kimberly from the Dalligate scandal, Dentsu failed to register in the Commission’s Transparency Register during its lobbying work with the Commission. This only happened last spring, under the supervision of MEPs. This heavy oversight of transparency is especially concerning given that Jan Hoffman, a former Commission official who deals with tobacco traceability, took up a position as Director of Regulatory Affairs and Compliance at Dentsu shortly after Dentsu won the contract. accepted.
Decisive moment for EU transparency
Looking to the upcoming industry-delayed review of the TPD, the Commission no longer has an excuse to repeat the same mistakes. With the WHO Protocol in force since September 2018, the EU must meet its higher legal obligations and implement a truly independent system to tackle the bloc’s soaring illicit tobacco trade – a reality borne out by Big Tobacco-funded research that underlines the failure of the EU system.
Over the past year, a group of proactive MEPs have offered hope for change by questioning the Commission about the lack of transparency that allowed Dentsu’s opaque selection and publishing 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 decisive months ahead, O’Reilly has rightly emphasized the crucial role of such MEPs in ensuring proper oversight of the EU’s executive branch, warning that “if it is up to me or my successor… then … it will be a challenge.”
Incoming ombudsman Teresa Anjiho faces a mission to uphold and expand O’Reilly’s legacy. With scandals like Dalligate exposing the tobacco industry’s alarming influence on EU policymaking, Anjinho must work decisively with like-minded Members of the European Parliament to increase transparency and ensure ethical governance within the Commission to prevent further erosion of public health and prevent confidence in Europe.