The EU's anti-fraud office has admitted that a senior official did ask to see documents obtained by Belgian police when they raided the offices of a German investigative journalist – an accusation that it had denied for several years.
Alessandro Buttice, spokesman for OLAF, the EU's anti-fraud office, told the head of the international journalists association API in an email on 28 March that a director at OLAF had requested access to the files of Hans-Martin Tillack, a journalist working for Stern magazine, whose office was raided in March 2004.
Both Franz-Hermann Brüner, OLAF's director-general, and Siim Kallas, the European commissioner for the fight against fraud, had previously maintained that they had never sought access to Tillack's files They told the European Court of First Instance (ECFI) in August 2004: “Neither OLAF nor any other Commission staff have ever contacted juge d'instruction Franzen.”
Buttice says in his email that Brüner had discovered that “one element” in the previous public OLAF/Commission replies to the Parliament and journalists' associations was “not factually correct”. He says that the error was detected when Thierry Cretin, who was appointed director at OLAF for investigation and operations, reviewed the case. The request was made by Cretin's predecessor Alberto Perduca, who is now working at the EU mission in Kosovo.
Brüner has sent a letter apologising for the error to the International Federation of Journalists and the International Press Association.
An OLAF spokesman said that there would be an internal investigation into the decision to request access.
Responding to a request to explain his involvement in the affair, Perduca referred European Voice to Brüner's office, saying that the director-general was responsible for informing the public. He said that he had already provided “factual elements” in order to have a “complete reconstruction” of the facts.
Tillack's office was raided and his files seized after OLAF had sent the Belgian authorities a file claiming that Stern had paid Commission officials several thousand euro for information. Tillack asked the ECFI to declare OLAF's decision to transmit his file to the Belgian authorities illegal and sought damages for defamation by the Commission. But the ECFI did not uphold the complaints in a ruling in October 2006. However, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled in November that the Belgian authorities had infringed his right to freedom of expression and awarded him €10,000 in damages and €30,000 in costs.
