Commission's Pfizergate loss hailed as ‘victory for transparency’

euronews (in English)

Commission's Pfizergate loss hailed as ‘victory for transparency’   The EU Court ruled against the Commission for failing to justify its refusal to release texts between von der Leyen and Pfizer’s CEO. Critics say the Commission’s actions undermine public trust and accountability, calling for greater transparency in decision-making.   READ MORE : http://www.euronews.com/2025/05/14/commissions-pfizergate-loss-hailed-as-victory-for-transparency  Subscribe to our channel. Euronews is available on Dailymotion in 12 languages

Transcript

00:00This is a legal and political thunderclap. The General Court of the European Union has

00:11condemned the European Commission's lack of transparency in the negotiations on vaccines

00:15during the COVID-19 pandemic. The judges annulled the Commission's refusal to disclose the text

00:21messages exchanged between its president and the head of Pfizer. These text messages between

00:27Ursula von der Leyen and the pharmaceutical giant took place during negotiations on the purchase of

00:32almost two billion doses. The Commission maintains that it does not hold these text messages and that

00:38their content was insubstantial. Another convincing line of defence. For the moment it's still unclear

00:46why they thought that these messages did not include important information. So this needs to be

00:53clarified and also in a way we can see that in general there is still a lot of secrecy around

00:59this. We still don't know, it's still unclear if these messages were deleted, if as the court say

01:04were deleted on purpose automatically, what happened there. So in our opinion since the beginning text

01:10messages should be included. The court criticised the Commission for failing to provide credible

01:15evidence to explain why it was unable to provide these text messages at the request of a journalist

01:21from the New York Times. In addition, the judges considered that the institution was unable to

01:26clearly specify whether or not these text messages had been deleted. The Commission remains unclear on

01:31this issue. I didn't say that any messages were deleted. What I did say were that as in any access

01:38to documents request, what we first do is to check are there any registered documents that fall within

01:45the scope of the request. We did that, didn't find any. The Commission considers that the judgment does not

01:50call into question the procedures for registering documents, but rather a lack of explanation.

01:55It interprets the court decision as an indication that it will have to justify itself better in the future.

Category

Transcript

Comments

Recommended