EU antitrust regulators fined Intel a record 1.06 billion euros ($1.45 billion) in May, claiming the chip maker abused its stranglehold on the semiconductor market to crush AMD, its main rival.

At the time, EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said: "Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for computer chips for many years."

The Commission was forced to issue denials over the weekend after the Wall Street Journal reported that one of the EUs ombudsmen, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, is set to deliver a report to the European Commission accusing it of 'maladministration'.

According to Diamandouros, the Commission did not formally record an account of a meeting it had with a senior Dell executive in August 2006, who rated the performance of AMD chips "very poor".

Such a testimony would imply that Dell chose Intel's chips on merit rather than being bullied into doing so, as the Commissions initial ruling found.

However, the new evidence is unlikely to change the outcome of the case, and there is no record of the discussion, so it is still unclear what the executive said, the report said.

The ombudsman has no authority to change the outcome, but he is one of the few independent checks on the EU's powerful executive arm, the EC.

Commission spokesman Alain Bloedt defended the EU action in the case which Intel is challenging, raising the spectre of a new antitrust saga between Brussels and the chip maker.

"The commission can reassure you that it surely respected Intel's right of defence," Bloedt told AFP.

The Intel case was marked by rancour on both sides. In the investigation, Intel took the unusual step of going to an EU court in Luxembourg to force the commission to add documents to the case file; the regulator dismissed that as a delaying tactic.

In another appeal lodged with the Luxembourg court in July, Intel claims among other things that the regulator violated human-rights protections meant to ensure a fair defense.

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