European Ombudsman Emily O'Reilly has asked the Commission to improve its guidelines for assessing bidders for contracts related to public policy after it awarded a study contract to BlackRock Investment Management in an area of financial and regulatory interest to the company.

Ms O’Reilly also asked the Commission to consider strengthening the conflict of interest provisions in the Financial Regulation - the EU law governing how public procurement procedures financed by the EU budget are conducted.

She said that the applicable rules were not robust and clear enough to allow officials to find conflict of interest other than in a very narrow range of professional conflicts.

“An application by a company to carry out a study meant to feed into policy that will regulate that company’s business interests should have resulted in significantly more critical scrutiny by the Commission,” said the Ombudsman

While the Ombudsman considered that the Commissio