Sounds like a threat...

Summary: E-mail that would leave Vice-President Willie Minnoye bashful, as it helps show not only bad policy but also attempts at suppression of discussion about it

THE ABOVE message is almost self-explanatory (it's an old E-mail). We understand that Willie Minnoye is very concerned about EPO material ending up in Techrights (for reporting that highlights EPO abuses) and it's not hard to see why he has been vocal about it; the more we find out about him, the more embarrassing it gets for him and some insiders consider Minnoye to be worse than Battistelli.

The above, showing a May 2014 B99 E-mail (cleaned up a bit for obvious reasons), is interesting for numerous reasons. The purpose of the E-mail VP1 sent to a Principal Director in May 2014 was to limit the effect of the industrial actions -- which consisted in the retardation of the delivery of granted patents by examiners -- on EPO production. He further warned not to forward the E-mail “to avoid any abuse by the staff reps on the statements made about the lack of published patents.”

"He further warned not to forward the E-mail “to avoid any abuse by the staff reps on the statements made about the lack of published patents.”"VP1 tried to intimidate individual examiners in order to force them to stop participating in the industrial actions by ranking the examiners with the highest number in retarded dossiers and declaring that “Retaining files on purpose is illegal.”

Nice move, eh?

From the man who boasted he would disregard a ruling from the highest Dutch court.

In addition to this, see the below announcement from this week. It was created and signed by Willie Minnoye (DG1 Strategic Directions 2017).

The text of DG1 Strategic Directions 2017 shows Willie Minnoye's continuous drive for production. Watch out for terms like “efficiency”, “coping with our workload”, “improving ... timeliness”, “Enhancing legal certainty by improving timeliness ...”, ”focus on efficiency” and ”continued progress in efficiency”...

In simply term, he encourages degradation of examination and thus patent quality. It makes Minnoye a very major (top-down) part of the EPO's problems. ⬆