The European Commission was wrong to refuse to make a text message sent by Ursula von der Leyen public to Pfizer’s chief during negotiations to secure a COVID-19 vaccine, a top European Union court ruled.
The General Court said the committee did not provide a plausible explanation as to why interactions between the president and Pfizer’s Albert Brula were not made public when investigative journalists requested them in 2021.
That year, Pfizer signed billions of euros in a vaccine contract with the EU, including trading 1.8 billion additional doses.
The content of the message between Von Der Leyen and Bourla remains a secret in the boiled case that has come to be known as Pfizergate in Brussels.
Anti-corruption group Transparency International welcomed the European Court’s ruling as a “groundbreaking victory over EU transparency,” adding that it should serve as a catalyst to end the “restrictive attitude towards freedom of information.”
Von Der Leyen became the chairman of the committee in 2019 and within a year he faced the challenges leading the EU’s response to Covid Pandemic.
She won her second five-year term later last year. Wednesday’s ruling threatens to undermine her reputation as she played such a crucial role, as she clearly lacked transparency surrounding the Pfizer vaccine trade.
The committee said it would study the ruling closely and consider the next step, but argued that transparency was “always the most important.”
The controversy broke out in April 2021 when New York Times journalist Matina Stevis revealed how Ursula von der Leyen personally negotiated with the Pfizer boss after German partner Biontek won regulatory approval for Covid drugs.
This article spurred research journalist Alexander Fanta, who worked for a German publication, to use requests for freedom of information to view exchanges of messages between January 2021 and May 2022.
Under the committee’s transparency rules, all staff, including the president, must archive documents.
However, mobile texting is a gray area, with cases largely dependent on whether they should be considered a critical record.
One EU official claimed this week that the SMS message was not “systematically considering public documents,” and was not recorded in that way.
Fanta filed a lawsuit against the European Ombudsman in 2021. There, the investigation found that the committee’s failure to search for text messages beyond normal recordkeeping was a maladoministration equivalent.
They followed up by Stevis and The New York Times and when the message had not been released yet, they took the European Commission to court.
The court on Wednesday said that while the Journalist and the New York Times were successful in refuting their claims, EU officials said on Wednesday they had relied on assumptions or changes or fraudulent information.
The court said if the presumption is rebutted, it is up to the committee to prove that the document does not exist or does not own it.
The committee did not clarify whether text messages were deleted, whether the court ruled, and whether they were deleted, whether they were intentionally made or whether Von Der Leyen changed their phones.
