The Commission will have to carry out investigations to find the text messages exchanged at the beginning of 2021 between the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the boss of the pharmaceutical group Pfizer, Albert Bourla in the context of negotiations around the contract for the purchase of 1 .8 billion doses of vaccines. This was announced on Friday by EU Ombudsman Emily O'Reilly. “
The limited way in which this request for public access to documents was handled means that no attempt was made to identify whether the text messages in question existed. This way of acting does not meet expectations in terms of transparency and administrative standards within the Commission
,” she said in a press release.
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To understand this affair, we have to go back to the publication, in April 2021, of an interview by the
New York Times
with the President of the Commission in which she claimed to have exchanged messages for a month with the boss of Pfizer. A journalist had, in the process, introduced a request for access to these exchanges as well as to the documents relating to the conclusion of this huge contract. But the institution did not provide him with the content of the messages in question, on the grounds that these SMS are not part of the documents recorded by the institution. He then turned to the EU ombudsman who opened an investigation in September 2021. She delivered an opinion on Friday.
In her submissions, the Ombudsman considers that SMS fall within the scope of EU law on public access to documents. “
If text messages relate to EU policies and decisions, they should be treated as EU documents
,” she says. According to the EU regulation dealing with this issue, a document corresponds to "
any content whatever the medium (written on paper or stored in electronic form or in the form of a sound, visual or audiovisual recording) relating to a matter relating to policies, activities and decisions falling within the sphere of the institution of responsibility”.
The Ombudsman therefore invites the Commission to "
ask the President's office to search again for relevant text messages, specifying that the search should not be limited to registered documents or documents that meet its criteria for registration
” and to determine, then, whether they should do the object of public access.
The institution has until April 26 to respond to these requests.
An embarrassing affair
This case is embarrassing for Ursula von der Leyen.
Because it could have an air of deja-vu.
When she was German Minister of Defence, “VDL” had been at the heart of a controversy concerning consultancy contracts awarded by her ministry for an amount of 200 million euros.
At the time, the Federal Court of Auditors had expressed reservations about the conditions for awarding this contract.
And the Commission of Inquiry created in the Bundestag to look into the conditions for awarding these contracts has never been able, despite its requests, to get hold of the text messages sent by von der Leyen from his work phone.
They had all been erased.
Heard at the beginning of 2020 before this commission, “VDL” had explained that the data had been erased after
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On Friday, the spokesman for the Commission, Eric Mamer, was not very forthcoming on the subject.
“
The rules apply to documents, regardless of their medium, physical or electronic.
But that absolutely does not mean that every SMS or WhatsApp that is sent must be kept because you have to see if it is an exchange that is like a telephone exchange or if it is really a document
, "said he said, promising that the Commission will respond to the EU mediator “
within the deadline that has been set
”.
It remains to be seen whether these text messages were kept by “VDL”.
For reasons of confidentiality, there has always been a great deal of opacity around the contracts for the purchase of vaccines concluded between the EU and the various pharmaceutical groups.
"
I hope that the President of the Commission has not negotiated certain points by SMS
", confides an EU source.
If so, these messages should probably be made public.