After a decade of outgoing Emily O’Reilly’s transformative tenure in Brussels, the EU Parliament elected the bloc’s new European Ombudsman for the next five years.
In the 15 December vote, Portuguese candidate Teresa Anjinho emerged victorious, with strong backing from the dominant EPP helping the former human rights law professor cruise past rivals such as Estonia’s Julia Laffranque, who had campaigned on stripping back this crucial role for transparent, ethical policymaking.
Encouragingly, Anjinho has expressed an activist approach to the EU watchdog position consistent with O’Reilly’s innovative, courageous protection of the bloc’s decision-making from corporate interests and shadow lobbying. Looking ahead to her 27 February start date, the new Ombudsman will have big shoes to fill, with the tobacco industry’s relentless infiltration of vital public health policies, for example, calling for ambitious transparency reinforcements ahead of the upcoming revision of the EU’s tobacco control framework
O’Reilly’s legacy of change
Since taking the reins in 2013, Emily O’Reilly, a former journalist, has taken on some of the EU’s most politically-sensitive cases. From scrutinising and confirming the maladministration of the Commission’s conflict-of-interest investigation into former President José Manuel Barroso to exposing shortcomings in its COVID-19 vaccine procurement, O’Reilly has consistently refused to shy away from challenging the bloc’s most powerful operators in her relentless quest for accountability and transparency.
One of O’Reilly’s most notable combats has been against tobacco industry lobbying, with a series of scandals within the Commission marking her tenure and the broader policymaking climate. Indeed, assuming office in the aftermath of a generation-defining Commission corruption saga, O’Reilly has overseen the post-2015 shift towards enhanced transparency scrutiny. In the past year alone, she twice ruled that the Commission’s failure to adhere to WHO FCTC transparency requirements on reporting and documenting meetings with Big Tobacco representatives constituted maladministration.
More than a simple administrative lapse, the institutional weakness that O’Reilly has singled out represents an urgent public health menace that calls into question the EU’s ability to place the lives of its citizens above the tobacco industry’s interests – an unfortunate truth dramatically exposed by the ‘Dalligate’ scandal.
Exposing the truth behind ‘Dalligate’
In October 2012, just days before he intended to table an ambitious, anti-industry revision of the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive (TPD), then-EU Health Commissioner John Dalli was forced to resign in the wake of a €60 million cash-for-influence scheme involving snus manufacturer Swedish Match and Maltese businessman Silvio Zammit, a personal associate of Dalli. In short, Zammit capitalised on his connections with Dalli to solicit this bribe from Swedish Match lobbyist, Gayle Kimberely, in exchange for dropping the snus retail ban from the TPD.
Despite Dalli’s insistence to the contrary, the EU Anti-Fraud Office’s (OLAF) subsequent investigation into the affair concluded that “unambiguous and converging circumstantial evidence” suggested he “was aware of this bribery attempt” and failed to intervene. In light of these findings, then-Commission President José Manuel Barroso requested Dalli’s resignation.
Hardly the end of the affair, the OLAF report “opens up more questions than it…answers,” according to former German MEP Ineborg Grässle, an assessment shared by the bloc’s civil society leaders. Lobbying watchdog NGO, Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), found that OLAF offered “no direct evidence that Dalli was…aware” of Zammit’s overtures to Swedish Match, deeming that the anti-fraud office had seemingly “selectively compiled arguments” against Dalli, “without considering the credibility of witnesses.”
These initial concerns with the OLAF probe’s integrity have since been validated, with former director Giovanni Kessler’s dubious investigative practices exposed. In June, a Brussels court of appeal upheld its ruling against Kessler for his illegal wiretapping of Zammit, while Kessler testified that Barroso had ordered the investigation – a major vindication for Dalli.
As former French MEP José Bové, who directed the recent ‘Dalligate’ film, has noted, “the fact that Mr Dalli was kicked out so quickly, without any legal basis, shows the tobacco companies wanted to win more time by postponing” the TPD revision. Convinced of Dalli’s innocence and political targeting, Bové has even received recorded confessions from two Swedish Match employees admitting they fabricated allegations at OLAF’s request to “legitimise” Dalli’s ousting.
Big Tobacco’s ongoing threats
As the CEO warned one year after Dalligate broke, Barroso’s Commission, keen to “brush it under the carpet,” had made “no efforts…to learn the lessons and try to prevent something similar from happening again.”
While the 2014 TPD revision mandated plain packaging and a menthol cigarette ban, Big Tobacco achieved a monumental victory in securing the removal of the WHO FCTC Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products and its industry-independent track and trace system provision. This glaring omission was notably facilitated by the fact that the WHO Protocol, drafted in 2012, had not yet achieved the 40 ratifications needed to enter into force, offering the Commission a justification to drop this vital measure from the TPD and opening the door for a system controlled by industry partners.
Several years later, this is exactly what happened when the EU executive awarded track and trace contracts to the likes of Swiss firms Dentsu Tracking and Inexto, the inheritors 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.
As with Gayle Kimberly from the Dalligate scandal, Dentsu failed to register in the Commission’s Transparency Register during its lobbying of the Commission, doing so only last spring amid MEP scrutiny. This major transparency oversight is particularly concerning considering Jan Hoffman, a former Commission official working on tobacco traceability, accepted a Director of Regulatory Affairs and Compliance position at Dentsu shortly after it won the contract.
Decisive moment for EU transparency
Looking to the upcoming, industry-delayed TPD revision, the Commission no longer has an excuse to repeat the same mistakes. With the WHO Protocol in force since September 2018, the EU must respect its higher legal obligations and implement a truly independent system to tackle the bloc’s soaring illicit tobacco trade – a reality confirmed by Big Tobacco-funded research that underscores the EU system’s failure.
In the past year, a group of proactive MEPs has offered hope for change, questioning the Commission on the transparency failures that enabled 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), exposing the industry’s undue influence over track and trace and other key tobacco control policies. In decisive months to come, O’Reilly has rightly emphasised the crucial role of such MEPs in ensuring proper oversight over the EU executive, cautioning that “if it’s down to little me or my successor…then…it’ll be a challenge.”
Incoming Ombudsman Teresa Anjiho faces a mission to uphold and expand O’Reilly’s legacy. With scandals like Dalligate exposing the alarming influence of the tobacco industry over EU policymaking, Anjinho must work decisively with like-minded MEPs to bolster transparency and ensure ethical governance within the Commission to prevent further erosion of public health and trust in Europe.