In her office on the 15th floor in the Altiero Spinelli buidling of the European Parliament, German centre-right MEP Ingeborg Graessle shuffles some papers on a table and pours two glasses of water.
She tells EUobserver that, along with two Green MEPs, she has, for the past year and a half, carried out her own enquiry into how John Dalli lost his job and on Olaf’s conduct in the events.
Looking back to European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso’s own words, Dalli had become “politically untenable” and had to go.
Barroso had read a summary of the Olaf report and called a meeting with Dalli after which Dalli immediately left his post. The commission chief issued a press release the same evening and called a press conference the next day.
Barroso, in his EU court testimony in July 2014, looked even further back – to 1999.
He recalled that his predecessor, Jacques Santer, 15 years ago was forced to resign along with his whole team in the worst corruption scandal in EU history.
He said he feared that if the Dalli story leaked to press before the commission took action there might have been a Santer II.
Nikolaj Nielsen