- How and where has the newly appointed official of the European Commission showed up?
- There is a purely ours, the Ukrainian reason, why this European official has fallen into the field of my attention much earlier than his current appointment, - Mykhailo Gonchar says- before he occupied, on a German quota, a purely bureaucratic position of the Head of Cabinet of the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker.That is, he was a person who in organizational terms provided the work of the Head of the EC. So, it was MartinSelmayr who invented the way to bypass European legislation, in particular the Third Energy Package, by the Russian-German Nord Stream -2 project. Pushed by him conclusion of the legal service (which he supervised) created the opportunity for the European Commission to wash its hands from the decision of the fate of this project, although it more than obviously contradicts to the principles of the Third Energy Package. In particular, in the sense of preventing the monopolization of sectors of the energy market of the EU by one of the players. However, when Ukraine, Poland and nine other EU member states called on the European Commission to block the project of the Kremlin and German energy lobby as inappropriate for the principles of the EU Energy Union, MartinSelmayr found a legal loophole for this project.
- How did Selmayr, having taken a minor position, manage to gain such weight to break the game of the senior EU officials?
-He is called a gray cardinal behind the head of the European Commission. As Jean-Claude Junckeris a man of a respectable age, has a health problem, he just passed many things to his head of Cabinet. So, the European Commission was accustomed to counting more and more withSelmayr. Moreover, he himselfis a high-class lawyer, he teaches courses at a number of universities...
-Why exactly this person has now been appointed Secretary-General of the European Commission? What are they expecting from him?
- New Secretary-General is a German creature, "supervisor" from Berlin for Juncker. He is in a position to turn the purely bureaucratic coordination position of the Secretary-General into a German supervisor over the European Commission. I regard this as further strengthening of Germany's influence on the European Commission.
Concerning the interests ofUkraine, then the chances for the final "washing of hands" by Brussels in the issue of "Nord Stream-2" have sharply increased. And in the absence of opposition from the European Commission, the probability of a gas pipeline project bypassing Ukraine will be almost one-hundredth.
Andrii GANUS
