@jps: You could email me or Dr.K. and get our guaranteed-perfect opinions. However, you must know that any hint of probing personal information regarding an editor is strictly prohibited, so if the essence of a message would be "X posted that Y has a COI because in real life ..." we can skip the email because that is absolutely prohibited and, if repeated, will correctly lead to an indefinite block until there is a plausible undertaking to never use that path. I fully support the WP:OUTING policy, although I agree that it leads to very unfortunate problems when a COI arises (I'm speculating about the COI—I saw nothing of the discussion leading to this). Wikipedia has problems—that is known—but nibbling out OUTING will not benefit the community.