03/02/2005 (Agence Europe) - Responding to questions from the press on Thursday, the spokesperson for the European Commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Joaquin Almunia, formally denied allegations that Eurostat had recently sent a letter to four Member States raising doubts about the reliability of their statistical data. According to two economic journalists, France, Germany, Italy and Portugal got a letter from Eurostat last week. The spokesperson indicated that the examples provided in these articles were old and had been sorted out. She did say, however, that she would have seen nothing strange about such an approach by Eurostat. She said that in the even of any doubt about examination of Member States' public accounts, it would be “perfectly normal” for the European Statistics Office to proceed to an exchange of information with the authorities concerned.