I believe these also suffer from restricted inlet ports in the cylinder head giving MAF fault codes. on September 7, 2015, 7:56 am, in reply to "Re: BMW X3 2.0 - white acrid smoke, no throttle response"
i'm no expert on these but If the MAF Value doesn't drop when the EGR opens there must be something wrong ether blocked EGR or MAF fault.
If it has a MAF code logged, could you be looking at substitute values from ECU rather that true ?
Aidan