European Commission is wrong to refuse the release of Von der Leyen, the court says

The European Commission was wrong to refuse to release SMS messages by Ursula von der Leyen at the head of Pfizer during negotiations to secure COVID-19 vaccines, the top court of the EU ruled.

Said the general court The committee had not given a plausible explanation why the exchanges between its president and Pfizer’s Albert Bourla could not be made public when an investigative journalist asked them in 2021.

That year Pfizer signed billions of euros in vaccine contracts with the EU, including a deal for 1.8 billion extra doses.

The content of the messages between Von der Leyen and Mr Bourla remains secret, in a simmering case that became known in Brussels as Pfizergate.

Anti-corruption Group Transparency International has praised the ruling of the European Court as A “milestone victory for transparency in the EU”Adding that it should serve as a catalyst to put an end to a “limiting attitude towards the freedom of information”.

Von der Leyen became president commission in 2019 and was confronted within a year with the task of leading the EU’s response to the COVID Pandemie.

She won a second term of five years at the end of last year. Wednesday’s statement threatens to damage its reputation because of the apparent lack of transparency around the Pfizer -vaccine Deal, in which she played such an important role.

The committee said it would accurately study the ruling and consider the following steps, but that insisted that Transparency was “always of the utmost importance“.

The controversy broke out in April 2021, when the New York Times journalist Matina Stevis revealed how Ursula von der Leyen had negotiated Privé with the Pfizer -Baas after his German partner Biontech won legal approval for his COVID Medicijn.

The article advised investigative journalist Alexander Fanta, who worked for a German publication, to use an application for freedom of information to view the exchange of messages between January 2021 and May 2022. But the European Commission rejected him and said it did not have the documents.

According to the committee’s transparency rules, all employees, including the president, have to archive their documents.

However, mobile SMS messages are a gray area and the case, however, is largely dependent on whether they should be considered important data.

One EU officer argued this week that SMS messages were not “systematically regarded as public documents” and were not recorded as such.

Fanta took the business to the European Ombudsman in 2021, where an investigation Discovered that the commission’s absence to search for the SMS messages Beyond the usual archiving was the mismanagement.

Stevis and the New York Times followed and when the messages were not yet released, they brought the European Commission to court.

The court ruled on Stevis’ challenge on Wednesday that the EU’s executive had trusted “on assumptions or on changing or inaccurate information,” while the journalist and the New York Times had succeeded in limiting their claims.

The court said that if a suspicion was refuted, it was up to the committee to prove that documents did not exist or that it did not own them.

The committee had not clarified whether or not the SMS messages had been removed, the court ruled, and whether they had been removed, whether it was deliberately done or whether Von der Leyen had changed its mobile phone since then.