The European Fee will attain out to former Fee Vice President and digital agenda chief Neelie Kroes, following stories that she lobbied on behalf of ride-hailing firm Uber throughout her “cooling-off interval” after her stint as a commissioner.
“The Fee has determined to ship a letter to the previous Vice President Kroes for a clarification on the data offered within the media,” Fee spokesperson Balazs Ujvari mentioned throughout the EU govt’s noon briefing.
Kroes was named in an investigation by the Worldwide Consortium of Investigation Journalists (ICIJ), which analyzed over 124,000 paperwork from Uber spanning 2013-2017. Whereas Kroes needed to observe an 18-month cooling-off interval after her Fee tenure, from November 2014 till Might 2016, she spoke to Dutch Cupboard members and supplied to arrange conferences with EU officers, the Guardian on Sunday claimed, based mostly on the leaked paperwork.
It is unclear what the Fee will ask Kroes. Ujvari mentioned the letter is a “bilateral” doc, so he could not element what was in it. A timeline for the response is unsure as nicely.
The Fee is “not the kind of establishment that jumps [to] conclusions shortly,” Ujvari mentioned. Nevertheless, he later added, “Because it says clearly within the treaty, former commissioners have quite a lot of obligations to fulfill, and if essential, there’s at all times a job which may be performed by the Court docket of Justice.”
Dutch S&D lawmaker Paul Tang has promised that he’ll file a criticism over the allegations to Fee President Ursula von der Leyen. “Will she uphold the EU’s integrity and sanction Kroes? Or will she permit the code of conduct to change into a lifeless letter and let Commissioners blatantly disregard the Fee’s personal ethics rulings?” he questioned in a tweet.
