Anti-fraud fun

A new man at the helm of OLAF.

As foretold on this page, the European Commission has duly appointed Giovanni Kessler, a former Italian anti-mafia prosecutor, now a member of Italy’s  parliament, as the director-general of OLAF, the EU’s anti-fraud office.

The Commission made its appointment on Tuesday after the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament’s budgetary control committee had both recommended the Italian for the job.

Kessler will have an interesting hand to play with the management layer immediately below him. Two of the four directors, Nicholas Ilett and Thierry Cretin, applied for the job of director-general: they made it to the short-list but Kessler was preferred.

The other two, Ian Walton-George, OLAF’s director of investigations and operations, and Kjell Larsson, director of the operational and policy support unit, are retiring (Larssen in January, Walton-George in February). Their replacements will not be picked by the Commission until some time in 2011. So management meetings could be interesting for a while to come.