THE CHAIRMAN of the parliamentary committee which rejected Kevin Cardiff’s nomination to the EU’s audit body wants to examine e-mails to MEPs in which the current Irish member of the body lobbied against Mr Cardiff.
Dutch liberal MEP Jan Mulder, who runs the budgetary control committee of the European Parliament, said the vote against Mr Cardiff remained legally valid as far as he was concerned.
However, he will decide whether any action is warranted after reading e-mails to senior committee members from Eoin O’Shea, Ireland’s member of the European Court of Auditors.
“I have asked to see them. We are not going to have a meeting about them but I’m certainly going to discuss them with certain people,” he said last night.
“I haven’t seen the e-mails, I don’t know the content of the e-mails, they did not play a role in any of the discussions in which I participated.”
While he still considered the vote on Mr Cardiff’s nomination to be “done”, Mr Mulder said it was open to a vote next month of the entire European Parliament to change the decision. The parliament has never overturned the committee’s decision before.
Mr Mulder had earlier said that he had received as many as 25 e-mails in relation to Mr Cardiff’s appointment.
“He defended himself well,” Mr Mulder said of Mr Cardiff’s appearance before the committee.
Meanwhile, the Minister for Energy Pat Rabbitte reacted with surprise to Mr O’Shea’s efforts to lobby against Mr Cardiff.
After news of the e-mails emerged at an Oireachtas committee, the Minister told reporters in Brussels that the development came as a surprise.
“I suppose Fianna Fáil nominees are accustomed to keeping the country in the family,” he said on the sidelines of an EU meeting.
“Maybe the outgoing member felt that he should engage in lobbying.
“I’m surprised if he did that after Government had nominated Mr Cardiff and I really don’t know the full detail of it yet.”
Mr Rabbitte said Labour MEPs Nessa Childers and Phil Prendergast, who criticised the selection of Mr Cardiff, were perfectly entitled to their opinion. Such remarks showed “the healthy nature of democratic exchange in the Labour Party I would have thought,” he said.
Asked whether the Government invited trouble for itself by nominating Mr Cardiff, the Minister said he was chosen because of his perceived suitability of the job, his technical knowledge and his professional background.
“There’s no doubt Mr Cardiff was in the Department of Finance in unprecedented difficult and troubled times.
“I don’t think that he or the Government ever believed that he wouldn’t be subjected to questioning on that involvement and obviously MEPs are fully entitled to do it.”
German Christian Democrat MEP Ingeborg Grässle, who voted against Mr Cardiff, said she tried to have the committee’s vote suspended because she still had outstanding questions in relation to his nomination.
The first question centred on what she described as possible conflict of interest between the department’s responsibility for the money Ireland borrows under its EU-IMF programme and the court’s responsibility to oversee the European Financial Stability Facility bailout fund.
She had wanted the committee to seek a written clarification on that point from the court’s president.
She also wanted more time to examine Mr Cardiff’s record in the years before the eruption of the financial crisis.
