EU Ombudsman Professor Nikiforos Diamandouros is reported by the Wall Street Journal to have stated in a confidential document that the EC did not include in its case file on the Intel anti-trust proceedings a report of an interview which the EC held with a Dell executive in 2006 which could have provided 'potentially exculpatory' evidence.
Intel has always said that the EC did not take account of some evidence in the case, and that the EC misinterpreted some of the evidence, and that the EC witheld certain evidence from Intel.
Intel at one point went to the European Court in Luxembourg court to complain that evidence was being witheld. That complaint was dismissed.
Apparently Intel asked the EC for a record of the interview with the Dell executive but, according to the WSJ's account of the Ombudsman's report, the EC said that no minutes of the meeting were taken.
Subsequently it transpired that an EC investigator had written an 'aide memoire' about his impressions of the meeting but, because this consituted an internal EU document, it could not be shown to Intel.
The significance of the Dell exec's evidence was, says the WSJ, that the exec had said AMD's performance was 'very poor'.
Such a statement might be evidence against the EC's findings in the case that customers bought Intel chips because of the rebates attached to them.
On the other hand, 2006 was the year Dell first started using AMD chips after decades of using only Intel chips.