Sautelet, Michel
A Belgian statistician from Eurostat who claims to have alerted both OLAF and the President of the EU-Commission, Romano Prodi, to contract fraud occurring within Eurostat, the Commission’s statistics agency.
Sautelet informed OLAF that Eurocost, a company founded by the then director-general of Eurostat, Yves Franchet, had been awarded contracts the value of which had been inflated by three.
Investigators from OLAF failed to act on Sautelet’s complaints, telling him his concerns about Eurostat related to mismanagement and not to fraud. They failed to contact any of the colleagues that Sautelet named who were prepared to endorse his story. The documents Sautelet provided to back his accusations are believed to have now disappeared after being "mis-archived".
Six months later, after the failure of OLAF to act, Sautelet sent a follow-up e-mail to Prodi. No action was taken and the email was passed on to Franchet.
Links
See whistleblowers and Eurostat Scandal
