Dalligate: OLAF may have acted illegally

The EU’s anti fraud agency (OLAF) went beyond its mandate and possibly broke laws in the way it obtained information in the Dalligate investigation, according to a report by its own watchdog. The annual report into OLAF’s workings, of which The Times has a copy, was presented yesterday at a heated hearing of the European Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee. Several MEPs expressed serious concerns about the way the investigation was handled and about the leadership of the OLAF director general, Giovanni Kessler, who was a protagonist in Dalli investigation. German MEP Inge Graessle, who had recently called for Mr Kessler to step down, described the situation as “a fire out of control” as she urged fellow parliamentarians to “stop downplaying” these things. She placed her criticism directly on the doorstep of Mr Kessler, saying that “these are not the working methods of OLAF but of the director general” and adding that: “The situation in OLAF is rotten.” Dutch MEP Jan Mulder went a step further, saying that he could not understand why the President of the European Commission, Manuel Barroso, did not check, before taking action on the OLAF investigation, whether the probe had...