Ms Emily O'Reilly:

Even though we had received a lot of individual complaints about EPSO and could have addressed those piecemeal, we decided instead to do it as a systemic investigation. With Qatargate, in an effort to be helpful to it, we got involved in the appraisal of the European Parliament of what it has on the table. Again, we are basically scanning the horizon and seeing where we could usefully get involved. We did one own-initiative investigation where we took on the revolving doors. We looked at 100 files of people who had left the Commission around 2021 and 2022 to go outside of the Commission, albeit not always to the private sector. We looked not at the individuals but how the Commission had handled that. This was an own-initiative investigation. Quite a few years ago, we looked into the transparency of the negotiations that were then ongoing between the EU and the US on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP.

Our investigations are not done in a spirit of being critical but one of lending our expertise. Obviously, the Commission has a problem if something has become systemic. That is the spirit into which we enter into these matters. That is a flavour of some of the own-initiative investigations we do.