Brussels, 28/06/2012 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 27 June, a Dutch national was sentenced in Belgium to 40 months imprisonment for having transmitted confidential information about common agricultural policy to industrial groups through a French lobbyist, when he was working as a European official (EUROPE 10364).
The former European official, Karel Brus, who no longer works for the Commission, was also ordered to pay a €55,000 fine and had almost €140,000 confiscated by the Brussels Correctional Court, according to a report by the Belga press agency. After the investigation was opened 11 years ago in 2001, the former official at Directorate General Agriculture was found guilty of corruption for having provided confidential information to a French lobbyist, Jean-Jacques Vies. This information helped French exporters win contracts. In exchange, the European official received many gifts from the French lobbyist such as, “several nights in Paris hotels… numerous meals and dinners in hostess restaurants and bars”, according to revelations made in the investigation. The lobbyist, Jean-Jacques Vies, was found guilty on Wednesday and sentenced to an 18 month suspended sentence. From 1987 he had been employed in Brussels by the Syndicate national pour l'expansion de la coopération agricole (Syncopex), whose biggest member is the Union Invivo, the largest agricultural cooperative group in France. Managers at the Union Invivo and Syncopex provided assurances that they were unaware of the information provided by Vies from confidential documents. They said that the organisation's representative, a former member of the antifraud squad, had taken action on his own initiative. The Union Invivo, however, was fined €500,000, as was the Dutch Glencore Grain Rotterdam group, for corrupting the official. (LC/trans/fl)