OLAF faces reform

Beleaguered European Union anti-fraud unit OLAF will have to argue its corner over proposed operational reforms tabled by European Commission president Romano Prodi. When he announced his intention to force OLAF to divulge details of its investigations last October, following the Eurostat scandal, the fraud unit said that it opposed any change to its procedures, which would cause disruption. But Prodi has ploughed ahead, proposing reforms to OLAF’s founding regulation that would require it to reveal to affected bodies the names of suspects in a fraud inquiry and to provide factual summaries. He has also proposed that OLAF should not reach any final conclusions in a case without suspects exercising a right to reply. The unit is set to come under further pressure this year when it is audited by the EU’s financial watchdog, the Court of Auditors regarding its “efficiency and effectiveness”, said court president Juan Manuel Fabra Vallés. The European Parliament will also investigate OLAF’s handling of the so-called Blue Dragon case, in which a French company alleged that weak Commission accounting controls allowed their accounts to be stripped by fraudsters involved in an EU-funded development project. OLAF closed the case, but the European Ombudsman later called on it to reinvestigate the matter, (which it subsequently refused to do).