She prefers to throw in the towel. The American Fiona Scott Morton, who was to be appointed to a key post in the EU for the regulation of tech giants, has announced that she will give up. His appointment as the new chief economist at the Directorate General for Competition had provoked indignant reactions among MEPs. And yesterday, French President Emmanuel Macron said he was “doubtful” about this choice at a summit.
“I tried to hire the best possible person for this job”, hammered in response the vice-president of the European executive, Margrethe Vestager, while explaining that it was not a decision-making position. but only to advise. But the Brussels executive seemed divided. Five commissioners, the Spaniard Josep Borrell, the French Thierry Breton, the Portuguese Elisa Ferreira, the Italian Paolo Gentiloni and the Luxembourgish Nicolas Schmit have written to President Ursula von der Leyen to demand a reassessment of this appointment, said Tuesday evening a senior European official who regrets a lack of debate and transparency.
No “reciprocity”
“At the time of choice, it was not made clear that the candidate was American and that there were potential conflicts of interest,” he said on condition of anonymity. “If we have no (European) researcher of this level to be recruited by the Commission, that means that we have a very big problem with all the European academic systems”, Emmanuel Macron explained on Tuesday. He underlined the absence of “reciprocity” on the part of the United States and China to appoint Europeans who would be “at the heart of (their) decisions”.
Elected officials have pinned down the former functions of Fiona Scott Morton as head of economic analysis at the antitrust division of the United States Department of Justice, between 2011 and 2012, or as a consultant for large tech groups such as Amazon, Apple and Microsoft . They denounce possible conflicts of interest and the risk of interference by Washington in EU decisions.
More information to come with 20minutes.fr…/…