The former european commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes, in charge of monitoring the world of business, has been the director of a company in the Bahamas during his tenure, and this in defiance of eu rules, revealed on Wednesday the european newspapers.
according To documents in the possession of the German daily, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and the international Consortium of investigative journalists ICIJ, Ms. Kroes has been a director of Mint Holdings Ltd., an offshore company established in the Bahamas, “July 4, 2000 to October 1, 2009″, revealed the daily Dutch Trouw and Het Financieele Dagblad.
However, she was commissioner of the competition between 2004 and 2009 (before being vice-president of the european Commission until 2014) and the code of conduct of the european Union provides that “the members of the Commission may not exercise any other professional activity, whether gainful or not”.
The commissioners must, at the beginning of their mandate, not only to renounce all their duties of direction, but also notify in a public register of all those who had given or not to a payment, exercised in the previous ten years.
The former Dutch minister of Transport claims to have abandoned in 2002 its position within Mint Holdings and have left this company in 2004 at the beginning of his first mandate as a european commissioner, reported to the media in the netherlands.
The former commissioner “was, according to his own words, a non-executive director and would have given strategic advice to Mint Holdings, which wanted to buy shares in the giant american energy Enron for six billion dollars,” explain the two daily newspapers. “This purchase has failed in the summer of 2000.”
“Because that Mint Holdings has never been operational according to her, she (Ms. Kroes) has never made a state of its functions in the management” of this firm, is continuing to Trouw and Het Financieele Dagblad, which publish several documents whose source could not be confirmed.
Ms. Kroes has recognized from these two newspapers that she had been “officially in violation of the code of conduct of commissioners”.
The team of lawyers of the former european commissioner has, for its part, told the Guardian that their client was “in agreement that officially, it would have had to declare its functions of director”.
“Ms. Kroes will inform the president of the european Commission for this omission and will assume full responsibility”, they said to the british newspaper.
They added that Neelie Kroes was thought that the company Mint Holdings had been liquidated in 2002, and in addition, she had received no compensation.
A spokesman for the Commission said that the ex-commissioner was now informed european authorities of this case. “We will verify and analyze this information before making a decision”, she added.
Ms. Kroes ensures to bear the full responsibility of his actions and accept the consequences, according to the press in the netherlands.
Neelie Kroes, currently an advisor paid to Bank of America and Uber, has made a reputation in Brussels by taking in the part of its fight against the dominant positions on the markets, Microsoft as well as the energy groups E. ON and GDF Suez, among others.
In total, some 1.3 million records of businesses in the Bahamas in the possession of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the ICIJ have been made public under the name of BahamaLeaks, according to Trouw and Het Financieele Dagblad.
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