Ombudsman raps EU probe after Intel claim

European competition officials have been rapped for failing to properly record a meeting with an executive of computer maker Dell during the course of their long investigation into antitrust abuses by Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker.

But the European Ombudsman, who has been looking into the way the case was handled following a complaint from Intel last year, did not make any finding as to whether the European Commission’s conduct had infringed Intel’s rights of defence.

The ombudsman, Nikiforos Diamandouros, also dismissed Intel’s second allegation – namely that there was maladministration in the way the commission encouraged Dell to enter into an information exchange agreement with Advanced Micro Devices.

AMD competes with Intel and had originally complained to the commission about its larger rival’s business practices.

After a 10-year investigation, the commission found, in May this year, that Intel had abused its dominant market position and encouraged computer manufacturers to reject AMD products. It imposed a record-breaking €1.06bn ($1.58bn) fine on Intel.

Intel is now appealing that decision and maintains it did not behave illegally. However, as other international regulators continued to probe the same matter, Intel agreed last week to pay AMD $1.25bn to settle a private damages claim which the smaller company had brought against it.

Intel had submitted its complaint about the European Commission’s investigation to the European Ombudsman in July 2008. Its first claim was that officials had failed to take minutes of a meeting with a senior Dell executive two years earlier, which dealt with the Intel investigation.

The ombudsman’s report, published on Wednesday, agreed that the commission did not make a proper note of the meeting and that its investigation file did not contain an agenda for the meeting.

He concluded that this did amount to maladministration, but did not make any finding over whether Intel’s defence rights were infringed.

He rejected Intel’s second charge of maladministration over the Dell-AMD information exchange agreement, which, Intel alleged, gave AMD accress to information in the commission’s investigation file.

He did, however, find that the commission had failed to make a proper note of a telephone conversation with Dell, in which the information exchange agreement was discussed and recommended that, in future, proper notes should be made of any meetings or telephone calls with third parties concerning “important procedural issues”.