Bad apples

Alessandro Butticé, combative spokesman for Olaf, the EU's anti-fraud office, has had to come out fighting on the Commission's intranet in defence of a calendar distributed to nearly all European Commission staff, many of whom ungratefully questioned whether the 60x30cm ‘desktop companion' was in line with the Commission's green ambitions.
Butticé said that Olaf usually uses recycled paper for its publications. He told European Voice that the calendars (34,000 of them) cost only €1.75 each to print, as it was done in-house by the Publications Office based in Luxembourg and designed by Olaf's own web designer.
Some staff have questioned the design, which features a winding pattern meant to depict the Commission's DNA profile. The names of the Commission's departments and services are incorporated, interspersed with apples. The rationale for the apple motif becomes clear at the end of the spiral where there is a clearly rotten apple with a worm emerging. This is meant to illustrate that fraud in the EU institutions is caused by “bad apples” which, in the words of Franz-Hermann Brüner, the Olaf director-general, “should not be allowed to spoil the barrel”. Each page of the calendar reproduces the two paragraphs of the Commission staff regulation, stating that they have a responsibility to report cases of fraud to their line managers or directly to Olaf.
Butticé says that the aim of the calendar is to remind Commission officials that it is everyone's responsibility to fight against fraud. Officials would be reminded of their duty by the Olaf publication on their desks. Simple, really.