Cresson may now face criminal investigation

As the European Parliament began screening 19 new EU commissioners for ethical probity yesterday, Mrs Edith Cresson, the woman who brought down the previous commission last March, came back to haunt proceedings in a fresh scandal involving forged documents. For the first time, EU officials have mentioned the possibility of forwarding her case to judicial authorities for a criminal investigation.

The disgraced former prime minister of France - still the acting EU Commissioner for Education and Scientific Research - submitted bogus, post-dated scientific reports allegedly drafted by her long-time friend and dentist, Dr Rene Berthelot, as "proof" that he actually earned the one million French francs (£120,048) he was paid for advising Mrs Cresson on AIDS between 1995 and 1997, according to Le Parisien and France Soir newspapers. Dr Berthelot accompanied Mrs Cresson to Brussels and lived in her flat there.

A year ago, an obscure Belgian newspaper, La Meuse - la Lanterne, revealed that a Luxembourg company named PerryLux maintained a phantom payroll for friends and relatives of EU commissioners in exchange for EU contracts. Dr Berthelot was among the beneficiaries.

Mrs Cresson was not personally cited, but she made such a fuss over the La Meuse report, issuing denials and threatening lawsuits, that journalists began digging into her relationship with Dr Berthelot and discovered that he had spent 18 months on the EU payroll as her adviser. In October 1998, Mrs Cresson began handing out Dr Berthelot's "reports" to journalists - seven letters totalling 24 pages, dated between October 1995 and March 1997. When an experts committee was formed in January 1999 to investigate this and other examples of corruption in the EU Commission, Mrs Cresson submitted the same seven documents.

Although the "Cresson papers" are dated between 1995 and 1997, the code printed on them by an EU Commission computer shows they were in fact written in 1998, that is to say after Dr Berthelot ceased to be her adviser. Mrs Cresson is on holiday and has not commented on the allegations of forgery. Her office claims the documents were written before 1998 but entered in the EU computer system only that year.

Meanwhile, Dr Berthelot (70), is in hospital in Poitiers with a serious illness. His wife told Le Parisien that she feels "a little bitter" that Mrs Cresson has not even telephoned to inquire about his health.