The European Commission is wrong to refuse to release von der Leyen’s messages, the court says

The European Commission was wrong to refuse to release text messages sent by Ursula von der Leyen to the Pfizer leader during negotiations to provide Covid-19 vaccines, the EU High Court ruled.

The General Court said The Commission had not given a plausible explanation of why the exchange between its Pfizer president and Albert Burla could not be public when an investigative journalist requested them in 2021.

In the same year, Pfizer signed billions of euros in EU vaccine contracts, including a deal of 1.8 billion additional doses.

The content of the messages between von der Leyen and d -Burla remains in secret in the case of bathing, which became known in Brussels as Pfizergate.

The transparent corruption group welcomes the European Court’s decision as “A remarkable victory for EU transparency”Adding that it must serve as a catalyst to put an end to a “restrictive attitude to freedom of information”.

Von der Leyen became president of the committee in 2019 and within a year he faced the task of leading the EU’s response to the Covid Pandemic.

She won a second five -year term at the end of last year. The decision on Wednesday threatens to harm her reputation because of the obvious lack of transparency around the Pfizer vaccine deal, in which she played such a significant role.

The Commission said it would closely investigate the decision and examine its next steps, but insists that Transparency “has always been of paramount importance“.

The dispute broke out in April 2021, when New York Times journalist Mattina Stevis revealed how Ursula von der Leyen had a private negotiation with Pfizer’s boss after his German partner Biontech won regulatory approval for his Covid drugs.

The article encouraged investigative journalist Alexander Fanta, who works for a German publication to use a request for freedom of information to see the exchange of messages between January 2021 and May 2022. But the European Commission declined it, saying that there were no documents.

According to the Commission’s transparency rules, all employees, including the President, must archive their documents.

However, mobile text messages are a gray zone and the case depends largely on whether or not they should be considered important records or not.

An EU employee is arguing this week that SMS messages are not “systematically considered public documents” and are not recorded as such.

Fanta brought the case of the European Ombudsman in 2021, where an investigation found that the committee’s inability to search for text messages Beyond his usual records, he is abused.

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

A decision regarding Stevis’ challenge, the court stated on Wednesday that the EU CEO relied on “either on assumptions or for change or inaccurate information” while the journalist and The New York Times were able to disprove their claims.

The court said that if the presumption is refuted, then the Commission must prove that the documents either do not exist or it does not own them.

The Commission did not clarify whether the text messages were deleted or not, the court also ruled that they had been deleted, whether it was done intentionally, or whether von der Leyen has since changed its mobile phone.