Court, according to the court

The European Commission was mistaken to refuse the release of text messages sent by Ursula von der Leyen to the Pfizer head during the COVID-19 vaccine negotiations, the EU’s Higher Court issued.

Said the general court The commission did not give a plausible explanation why the exchange between his president and Albert Barla Pfizer could not be published when the journalist asked them in 2021.

This year, Pfizer has signed billions of euros in the EU vaccine contracts, including an agreement for additional doses of 1.8 billion.

The content of the posts between von der Leyen and G -Burla remains a secret, in the case, which became known in Brussels as pfizerGate.

Anti -Corruption Group Transparency International welcomed the European Court’s ruling as “Significant victory for transparency in the EU”Added that he should serve as a catalyst to put an end to “restrictive attitude to freedom of information”.

Von der Leyen became president of the commission in 2019, and during the year he faced the task of managing the EU’s reaction to the pandemia.

She won the second five -year term at the end of last year. The resolution on Wednesday threatens to damage its reputation due to the obvious lack of transparency associated with the Pfizer vaccine in which it has played a significant role.

The commission stated that it was carefully examining the ruling and consider its next steps, but she insisted that it insisted on this Transparency “always had paramount importance“

The controversy broke out in April 2021, when the New York Times journalist Matin Stevis discovered how Ursula von der Leyen agreed with the bosser boss after his German partner BionTech received a normative permit.

The article pushed the journalist -Alyaksandr Fans, who worked in a German publication to use a request for freedom of information to see messaging from January 2021 to May 2022. But the European Commission abandoned it, saying that it had no documents.

According to the Commission transparency, all employees, including the president, must archive their documents.

However, mobile text messages are a gray zone, and it was largely dependent on whether they should be considered as important records.

One EU official claimed that SMS -messages were not “systematically considered by public documents” rather than recorded as such.

The fountain accepted the case at the European Ombudsman in 2021, where the investigation It turned out that the commission’s refusal to seek text messages In addition to the usual accounting due to improper control.

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

The steviss call ruling, the court on Wednesday stated that the EU executive director was counting on “either for assumption or inaccurate information”, while the journalist and the New York Times reached a rebuttal of their requirements.

The court stated that if the presumption was dismissed, then the commission should prove that the documents did not exist or did not possess them.

The commission did not specify whether the text reports were deleted, the court ruled, and if they were deleted, whether it was done intentionally, or background der Leyen changed his cellphone.