You may recall the scandal around the former EU health commissioner John Dalli who was sacked after being accused of being involved in an attempt to solicit a bribe from the snus company Swedish Match and subsequently exposed for some strange shenanigans in the Bahamas. Dalli was vigorously defended by 'public health' groups at the time and Private Eye made the ill-judged decision to take his side on a couple of occasions.
Dalli's defence is that he is the victim of an inexplicable conspiracy conjured up by José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission, OLAF, the tobacco industry and numerous others. The gist of the plot is that Barroso didn't want Dalli to regulate cigarettes and so conspired to replace him with a more pro-tobacco commissioner who would water down the Tobacco Products Directive (nb. Dalli's replacement is not remotely pro-tobacco and the TPD was not watered down).
On Monday night, BBC4 showed a documentary about Dalli which is well worth watching. The title and blurb for the programme (see above) are rather misleading. The 'mystery' involved smokeless tobacco, not cigarettes, and Dalli was not accused of being 'in the pocket of "big tobacco"', he was accused of trying to get in the pocket of a small tobacco company (and was reported to the authorities by the company).
I was expecting a pro-Dalli whitewash and the first 20 minutes seemed to confirm my fears. (Spoiler alert.) At first, the two Danish journalists are taken in by Dalli's protestations of innocence and are keen to blow the cover on a Big Tobacco conspiracy. But as they dig a little deeper and get to know more about the man, things take a turn.
Dalli shows them e-mails from a mystery correspondent named Maria who claims to have a dossier proving that Barroso took a bribe from the tobacco industry and put it in a Norwegian bank account. But this evidence never surfaces and we find that Maria does not exist.
They then go to Bahamas and find out about a con artist friend of Dalli's known as 'Ladybird'. They meet some American victims of a scam who point the finger at Dalli. When the journalists mention these new accusers to Dalli, he claims that they are also part of Barroso's conspiracy against him. Other accusers are said to have been 'brainwashed'.
By the end of the documentary, the journalists have concluded that 'Maria' is Dalli himself and that the man is, at the very least, half-mad. It's hard to disagree.
You can watch it on the iPlayer for another 27 days.
No comments:
Post a Comment