In 2012 | Smoke gets in your eyes: a resignation still draped in mystery

When all the ingredients are put together, it looks like the most unlikely of graft stories: a quirky caper staged in the most European of settings, characters who are most surely destined to bungle up a €60 million ruse.

How did a circus promoter cum caterer cum long-time Nationalist activist turn out to be a protagonist in an elaborate attempt at getting the European Commissioner for health and consumer policy John Dalli to reverse an EU retail ban on snus, the Swedish snuff tobacco that is consumed by placing a teabag-like package beneath the lips?

Silvio Zammit, who until 16 October 2012 was Sliema's deputy mayor, claims he asked Swedish Match and the snus lobby ESTOC for a €60 million bribe to get their representatives off his back - apparently because they were harassing him for a meeting with John Dalli, for whom he canvassed in Sliema.

Whether or not Zammit's allegedly naïve ruse is what it really is, the request - made somewhat casually over a table outside his nondescript Sliema coffee kiosk - kicked off in motion an investigation by the EU's anti-fraud unit OLAF that would lead to John Dalli's resignation.

The accusation was simple enough: Dalli was aware that Zammit was using his name to solicit the bribe, but did nothing about it, OLAF director Giovanni Kessler claimed in the investigation that gave EC president José Barroso the pretext to demand that Dalli resign immediately.

The "unambiguous circumstantial evidence" - by OLAF's own admission having nothing directly incriminating against Dalli - became the subject of much speculation on how much Dalli knew.

Dalli was spearheading a review of EU tobacco laws which would introduce the much-maligned plain package for cigarettes. According to the former commissioner, there was never any intention that he would reverse the EU's ban on snus, although Gayle Kimberley - a Maltese lawyer appointed by Swedish Match to lobby Dalli - had told her employers after meeting the commissioner that Dalli "had balls" to take such an unpopular decision, as it were.

When the time came to negotiate a meeting with Dalli, Zammit - already well known to Swedish Match and ESTOC - appeared as the middleman between Dalli and Kimberley. Aware of the interest in reversing the snus ban, it was Zammit who proposed to Kimberly and Swedish Match representative Johann Gabriellson [both Kimberley and Gabriellson were former employees of the European institutions at one time] the €60 million bribe.

Politics and the damage done

Even if the Maltese police do not charge John Dalli with either trading in influence or bribery, the question will always haunt the European Commission as to why the Maltese commissioner was dumped so unceremoniously.

Talking to the media hours after his resignation, Dalli accused Barroso, the president of the commission, of having threatened to dismiss him if he did not resign, effectively forcing him to leave his post. This was forcefully denied by the Commission, who warned Dalli that indiscretion in relation to his former portfolio could result in legal action.

While Dalli insisted that he had not received any information from OLAF regarding the allegations, it was reported that the chair of OLAF's advisory board had stepped down because he had failed to properly inform the board about the details of Dalli's alleged misconduct before handing the information to the Maltese authorities. Meanwhile, three health non-governmental organisations involved in advocacy campaigns to update the Tobacco Directive reported that their offices were burgled two days after the resignation of the health commissioner, with laptops and strategy documents being stolen.

OLAF investigations are not criminal investigations and with 'only' circumstantial evidence to go by, it seemed that EC president José Barroso was happy enough to let Dalli fall from grace while an entire European Parliament clamoured for more information on the serious investigation. Questions soon arose as people began to speculate whether Dalli's nanny-state laws were interfering with a Pax Tobacco inside Brussels.

MEPs from the European Parliament's budgetary control committee demanded that the Commission grants them access to the cooperation agreements OLAF has with Philip Morris, British-Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco and Japan Tobacco, which pay $2.15 billion to the EU to address the problem of contraband and counterfeit cigarettes.

Even more illustrative of the Commission's intimacy with big tobacco was news that Edmund Stoiber, a German Bavarian politician who heads the European Commission's high-level group on cutting administrative burdens, lobbied Dalli on the controversial tobacco directive during one of his group's meetings.

This example illustrated the reality of rife lobbying inside the European Commission and the billion-dollar interests it represents: an estimated 25,000 lobbyists wield some influence in the EU through business groups and informal meetings and dinners.

Dalli's tobacco directive had already been delayed by Commission secretary-general Catherine Day twice, which MEPs and health groups believe formed the background to the unpopularity elicited by Dalli's anti-smoking campaign.

OLAF's director Giovanni Kessler says Dalli's fault lay in not acting on the fact that Silvio Zammit was setting up lobby meetings with him, while the Commission pounced on this fact to say that Dalli's unofficial contact with industry through Zammit made his position untenable. At this point the jury is still out on whether Dalli was lackadaisical and nepotistic in his informal conduct, or whether a tobacco conspiracy is at hand.

"So why is it only Dalli who has been sacrificed to the gods of political tenability when other Commissioners, embroiled in similar situations, have been allowed to stay?" transparency watchdog Corporate European Observatory had noted in its blog.

German MEP Inge Graessle (EPP), who said the allegations that have cost John Dalli his job are not yet clear enough, has raised the matter of whether this scandal has been badly managed by Barroso. "I wonder how [OLAF's] work was done and what the conclusions were that led to the resignation - this for me is relevant: what is the criminal act at the heart of the investigation? We still don't know, and I'm interested in the work that the police will do on the investigation.

"I'm sure a commissioner from a bigger Member State would not have been dealt with that way... We should also care about small Member States."

From Brussels to Pietà

While police investigations remain ongoing, even though Silvio Zammit has been charged with bribery, Dalli's resignation did kick-start a revolution of sorts inside the PN.

Erstwhile leadership rival of Lawrence Gonzi, the Dalligate investigation would have certainly been a topic of discussion inside some dark storage room at the Office of the Prime Minister - the ministry which hosts Afcos, the anti-fraud coordinating unit that led the Malta-part of the investigation for OLAF. The highest echelons of the Maltese government were aware of the OLAF investigation since June 2012.

Dalli's fall from grace perhaps was the ultimate what-for for supporters of Gonzi who felt the self-appointed 'father-confessor' of disgruntled MPs still harboured ambitions for the party leadership.

Additionally, the need to appoint a new commissioner meant that Gonzi could kick-start a rejuvenation of his party: by appointing Tonio Borg to the post of EU commissioner and having an election for the deputy leader's post. There is no doubt that the PN's haranguing of the Opposition through the good office of the charismatic Simon Busuttil is - all things considered - thanks to the careless talk of one Nationalist circus promoter.