On Monday, New Europe published emails from high in the European Commission that detailed the Commission's secret rewriting of the Tobacco Directive, transforming it from an instrument to contain the harm that tobacco causes into an instrument that played the tobacco lobby's tune.
Paola Testori Coggi (Director General of SANCO) sent an email to Catherine Day (Secretary-General of the European Commission) and Luis Romero Requena (Director-General of the Legal Service) on 7 September at 22:55, that detailed the changes that weakened the directive.
The author of the email, Paola Testori Coggi was interviewed by OLAF, the EU anti-fraud body as part of their investigation into allegations made against then health commissioner, John Dalli.
Her replies to the investigators, on 17 July, are so markedly different to the agreement in her email that grave questions are raised about who was behind the filleting of the Tobacco Directive.
The discrepency is so great that OLAF chief, Giovanni Kessler should hold an immediate investigation into the replies and how they point to something being very wrong at the heart of the European Commission. Read more;
