Ms Emily O'Reilly:

-----the contract was to devise a report on banking, regulations relating to investment in sustainable projects and so on. It is critical and important to climate change and what regulations will come to deal with it.

There was an allegation of a conflict of interest. Our finding was that there was not maladministration because, according to the tight rules of the Commission on what constituted a conflict of interest, to our mind it was not fair to suggest that the people who looked at this did not follow the rules. What we did say was the conflict of interest did not encompass the issue posed by BlackRock. A company, on the one hand, was advising and dealing in energy products while, on the other hand, it was helping to make the rules in a way or advising on rules that could be made in climate change regulation.

Our recommendation was for the Commission or the Legislature to look at the guidelines for what constitutes a conflict of interest. The overarching point I made on that was that one had to join the dots. On the one hand, the Commission comes up with a good vision as to what it will do to prevent climate catastrophe. The Commission President, Madame von der Leyen, described what could be done as the EU's moonshot moment. One has to link those big statements, however, with the smaller steps taken in other places. A small step is to give a contract to a particular company that may have a conflict of interest in those matters. It is all part of this which has to be recognised by the institutions.