The European Commission is wrong in refusing to release von der Lyan messages, the court says
The European Commission was mistaken in refusing to release the text messages sent by Ursula von der Lin to the President of Fayzer during negotiations to secure Covid-19 vaccines, and the European Union Supreme Court ruled.
The General Court said The committee did not provide a reasonable explanation about the reason why the stock exchanges were unable to publish its president and Albert Porla from Pfizer when a journalist requested it in 2021.
That year, Pfizer fell billions of euros in vaccine contracts with the European Union, including an additional 1.8 billion doses deal.
The content of the messages between Von Der Leyen and Mr. Burla remains secret, in a boiling condition that has become known in Brussels as Pfizergate.
The Anti -Corruption Group praised the international transparency of the European Court’s ruling as “A historical victory for transparency in the European Union”Adding that it should serve as an incentive to put an end to the “restricted position of freedom of information”.
Von der Leyen became a chairman in 2019, and during the year of the European Union Covid’s response to the European Union’s response task.
She won a long time from the age of five years late last year. On Wednesday’s referee threatens its reputation, due to the clear lack of transparency surrounding the Fieser vaccine deal, in which it played an important role.
The committee said that it will study closely and think about its next steps, but it insisted on that Transparency was “always of utmost importance“.
The controversy erupted in April 2021, when the New York Times Matina Stefis revealed how Ursula von der Lynne has been negotiated with the Pfizer coach after his German partner P’yontec with organizational approval of her Covid.
The journalistic article stimulated the investigation Alexander Fanta, who worked in a German post, to use the information freedom request to know the exchange of messages between January 2021 and May 2022. But the European Commission rejected him, saying that it had no documents.
Under the transparency rules of the committee, all employees, including the president, must archive their documents.
However, portable text messages are a gray area, and the issue was largely dependent on whether or not it should be considered.
One of the European Union officials argued this week that SMS messages were not “general documents systematically” and were not recorded in this way.
Fanta took the case to the European Grievance Secretary in 2021, where the investigation I found that the committee’s failure to search for text messages In addition to keeping the usual records, it reached mismanagement.
Stevez and New York Times continued, and when the messages were not yet issued, they took the European Commission to the court.
To judge the Stevez challenge, the court said on Wednesday that the European Union’s executive authority relied “either assumptions or inaccurate changes or information”, while the journalist and the New York Times succeeded in refuting their claims.
The court said that if an assumption is refuted, the matter is up to the committee to prove that the documents are either not present or not.
The committee did not clarify whether the text messages were deleted or not, the court ruling, and if it was deleted, whether it was deliberately done or whether Von der Leyen has changed its mobile phone since then.
