The European Parliament should establish a special committee to probe the tobacco scandal that led to the resignation of EU health commissioner John Dalli, Green lawmakers said Wednesday, arguing that their own inquiries have been blocked.
Parliamentarian Bart Staes lamented "the number of anomalies" in the Dalli case, taking aim also at the actions of the EU's executive.
"We want to simply look into the bad operations at the European Commission, what went wrong in its contacts with the tobacco industry and also in the development of its tobacco regulation," he said.
"The problem we are encountering ... is that we are being systematically told that a criminal investigation is underway and that there thus are a certain number of elements that cannot be
revealed," he added.
Commission spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde, however, insisted that the EU's executive has "amply" and transparently answered all questions raised by the parliament and that it acted in conformity with World Health Organization rules on tobacco lobbying.
Brussels had been rocked in October by Dalli's resignation, which came after EU anti-fraud investigators said he did nothing to stop an acquaintance from asking a Swedish snus company for money to influence contentious new EU rules on tobacco products.
The case has since been handed over to Maltese criminal investigators, Tonio Borg has been named to replace Dalli, and one of his first actions was to bring forward the new rules - which seek
bigger health warning on tobacco products, among other things.
But Green lawmakers argue that the lessons from the scandal have yet to be learned, pointing to reports that tobacco lobbyists held a series of meetings with a number of other European Commission
officials as the new rules were being formulated.
"It is obvious that the Dalli case must have consequences for the future of lobbying in Brussels," EU parliamentarian Inge Graessle of the European People's Party, the largest political group in the legislature, recently said.
Green co-chair Rebecca Harms will ask the leaders of the parliament's other political groups to approve the creation of the special committee on Thursday, Staes said.
"For us, as parliamentarians, we are in a situation that is clearly unacceptable," the Greens' Jose Bove said.