Red faces all round

Date: 30/01/1997

It was a week which the European Commission's Spokesman's Service would probably rather forget.

With a new dispute over cash for speeches, a furore about an alleged Commission conspiracy with the UK over mad cow disease and the release of a background document which stated that the next round of enlargement was unlikely to take place before 2002, the porte parole could be forgiven for wanting to keep a low profile for a while.

The biggest headache was the German magazine Der Spiegel's claims that Industry Commissioner Martin Bangemann had received payment for making speeches.

Not so, insisted his spokesman Jochen Kubosch, referring to an edict in autumn 1995 banning such enterprise. Before then, said Kubosch, it had been a “grey area”.

But the real fly in the Commission's ointment was the fact that the German magazine's original account of an alleged payment to Bangemann for making a speech in Switzerland suddenly disappeared from the Commission's own daily review of the European press.

It was certainly there in an earlier collection of the photocopied cuttings, taking up pages 49, 50 and 51. But other copies circulating later the same day were a little thinner. Closer inspection revealed the page numbers ran 47, 48, 52.

It was a technical problem, explained chief spokesman Klaus van der Pas. An internal Commission matter, he declared.

So, it appeared, was the matter of Le Soir's claims that Commission minutes on BSE showed evidence of complicity between the institution and the UK authorities.

Not so, said Van der Pas. There were two kinds of minutes, he revealed: those referring to the Commission's collegial decisions and those referring to the Commissioners' personal remarks. The former were in the public domain, but the latter were private and not for publication.

But no excuses were proffered for the press release which, by putting a date on the next round of EU enlargement, flew in the face of the official Commission line that no dates could be given because of the complexity of the process.

Red-faced officials merely stated that an “erroneous” version of the text had been released by mistake.