I have contacted high officials of the European Commission that, in unison and in a categorical tone, even with a visible irritation, have stated that there was no letter that the Romanian minister of Justice would have sent to the Commission in its entirety, and so much the less to the cabinet of Commissioner Franco Frattini. Moreover, stunned by the persistence I was telling them about a document Hotnews agency published in English, they tried to access the source, at least to see how does a letter that might have been addressed to them and that has never got to the destination look like. For anyone who knows the minimal rules of procedure within the European Commission, it is absolutely clear from the beginning that a minister of Justice of a Member State couldn't have sent or managed by his signature the existence of a letter by which were requested modifications in the text of a country's Regular Report. And this is, first of all because the text of the report, the way you could access few days ago in our newspaper, had a final version that had been decided only at the level of the Commissioners College. If the text there is so much talk on is real and not an invention of one of the many laboratories of informational diversion at the disposal of one or another of the political parties in Romania, then it may represent no more than an exchange of retorts among the technical teams, via the Mission of Romania to the EU, but which has never got to the level of an official approach. (...) Finally, the last reason of stupefaction was the fact that the uproar in Romania hasn't stopped even after a spokesperson of the European Commission denied the existence of the letter in a press conference. The people I've met were bound to anonymity due to the Commission's decision that those who appear with public statements are only the commissioners and their spokespersons. However, they expressed their hope, disarmingly sincere, that at least now the letter-related scandal is over.

Cristian UNTEANU, Brussels