The European Commission was wrong to refuse to release text messages sent by Ursula von der Leyen to the chief of Pfizer during negotiations to secure COVVI-19 vaccines, judged the EU Superior Court.
The General Court said that the Commission had not given a plausible explanation on the reasons why the exchanges between its president and Albert Bourla de Pfizer could not be made public when an investigation journalist asked them in 2021.
That year, Pfizer signed billions of euros in vaccine contracts with the EU, including an agreement for 1.8 billion additional doses.
The content of the messages between von der Leyen and Mr. Bourla remains secret, in a simmered case which has become known in Brussels under the name of Pfizergate.
The Transparency International anti-corruption group welcomed the European Court’s decision as a “historic victory for transparency in the EU”, adding that it should serve as a catalyst to end an “restrictive attitude towards freedom of information”.
Von der Leyen became president of the commission in 2019 and, in a year, was faced with the task of directing the EU’s response to the cocovated pandemic.
She won a second five -year term at the end of last year. Wednesday’s decision threatens to harm its reputation, due to the apparent lack of transparency surrounding the agreement on the Pfizer vaccine, in which it played such an important role.
The Commission said it would study the decision closely and examine its next steps, but it insisted that transparency had “always been of capital importance”.
The controversy broke out in April 2021, when the journalist from the New York Times Matina Stevis revealed how Ursula von der Leyen had negotiated in private with the boss of Pfizer after her German partner Biontech won the regulatory approval of her cocvid drug.
The article stimulated investigative journalist Alexander Fanta, who worked for a German publication, to use a freedom of information to see the exchange of messages between January 2021 and May 2022. But the European Commission refused it, saying that it did not have the documents.
Under the commission’s transparency rules, all the staff, including the president, must archive his documents.
However, mobile text messages are a gray area, and the case has largely articulated whether or not they should be considered important recordings.
An EU official argued this week that SMS were not “systematically considered as public documents” and not recorded as such.
Fanta brought the case to the European Ombudsman in 2021, where an investigation revealed that the failure of the commission to seek text messages beyond its usual holding of files was equivalent to poor administration.
Stevis and the New York Times followed, and when the messages have still not been released, they brought the European Commission to court.
Declaring Stevis’ challenge, the court said on Wednesday that the EU executive was based “either on assumptions or on changing or imprecise information”, while the journalist and the New York Times had managed to refute their claims.
The court said that if a presumption was refuted, it belonged to the Commission to prove that the documents did not exist or that it did not have them.
The commission had not specified whether the text messages had been deleted or not, the court ruled and if it had been deleted, if it was done deliberately or if Von der Leyen had since changed his mobile phone.
