EU official charged in corruption probe

(BRUSSELS) - A European Commission official and two others have been charged in a corruption probe into EU tenders, Belgian prosecutors said Wednesday following police raids in four countries.

"Several tens of millions euros" had been embezzled in a fraud involving tenders to lease office space and provide security equipment for European Commission delegations outside the EU, said a spokesman.

The Commission official, aged 46, handles the delegations' infrastructure.

A second man charged, aged 60, is a personal assistant to an Italian member of the European Parliament.

The third man, 49, runs a private real estate consortium.

All three are Italian nationals living in Belgium. Their names were not released.

Belgian prosecutors brought charges against them for corruption of an international civil servant, violation of professional secrecy and criminal conspiracy.

"There were bribes of millions of euros for more than 10 years," said prosecution spokesman, Jos Colpin.

European Commission spokesman Johannes Laitenberger dismissed parallels with a corruption scandal in the late 1990s that brought down the then Commission.

The EU executive had done "everything possible to cast light" on the current case, he said.

The EU's anti-fraud authority OLAF said it first opened an investigation into the case in 2004 -- under the previous European Commission led then by Romano Prodi -- following a tip-off from an unsuccessful bidder in a tender.

It then tipped off Belgian authorities.

That led to Tuesday's dawn raids in Belgium, France, Italy and Luxembourg involving more than 150 police searching the premises of the Commission and the European Parliament as well as homes, businesses and banking offices.

OLAF, Italian Carabinieri, French financial police, and Belgian federal and fraud squad all played roles in the investigation. Laitenberger said the Commission was doing all it possibly could to help.

"The real question is to what degree prices were increased," he said, describing the EU's executive body as the victim of the fraud.

Once the investigation was concluded, the Commission would consider taking "disciplinary action and also perhaps bringing a case to court if necessary," he added.

Corruption cases at EU institutions are a sensitive issue after a scandal in the late 1990s brought the entire European Commission down.

Last July, the EU's top court found former French prime minister Edith Cresson guilty of favouritism when she was a top official in Brussels.

Cresson, who served as research and education commissioner from 1995 to 1999, was notably accused of hiring a dentist from her home town, Rene Berthelot, as an advisor. This was despite her having been warned that it was against EU rules.

The scandal surrounding Cresson, who was French prime minister in 1991 and 1992, helped spark the collective resignation of the entire European Commission under then president Jacques Santer in March 1999.

The Commission currently has a network of 132 delegations in non-EU countries with an annual budget of EUR  500 million, with EUR 56 million going to offices and EUR  20 million to security.