Friday, March 29

Von der Leyen slapped ears for denying access to his SMS with the CEO of Pfizer



“Not all text messages need to be recorded but it is clear that they fall under EU transparency law so the relevant messages must be recorded. It is not credible to defend the contrary”, concludes the European Ombudsman, Emily O’reilly, following an investigation by this EU watchdog into access to SMS messages exchanged by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, when they negotiated a new purchase agreement vaccines by the EU.

The case dates back to last year. It was the person in charge of the Community Executive who confirmed in an interview with the New York Times, in April 2021 that he had exchanged SMS with Bourla during the negotiation on the purchase of more vaccines. A journalist from Netzpolitik.org, Alexander Fanta, decided to ask the Community Executive on May 4 for public access to said messages and other documents related to these exchanges. The only thing he received was an email, a letter and a press release but not the text messages. After a complaint from an MEP Dutch Sophie in ‘t Veld the case came to the hands of O’reilly, which launched an investigation to assess the way in which the European Commission handled the request for information.

According to the result of the same, despite the request, the European Commission did not explicitly ask the members of the president’s cabinet to search for the required text messages and limited itself to claiming the documents that meet the internal registration criteria. in which, they pointed out, SMS do not enter. In the opinion of the defender, this action constitutes “A case of maladministration. “The narrow-mindedness with which this public access request was treated meant that no attempt was made to identify if there was any text message. This way of acting does not respond to the reasonable expectations of transparency and the administrative rules of the Commission”, criticizes O’reilly.

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Until April 26

Although the ombudsman admits that not all text messages must necessarily be recorded, those that clearly fall within the framework of European transparency legislation, as in this case, must be recorded. During the investigation, the Community Executive argued that a “text message or other type of instant messaging is, by its nature, a short document that does not contain, in principle, important information on matters related to policies, activities and decisions of the Commission” and that they do not record instant messages.

O’reilly’s response to these allegations is, however, resounding. “It is the content of the document that matters and not the support or the form. If the texts affect EU policies and decisions, they must be treated as EU documents”, warns O’reilly, who has urged the Community Executive to look again for the messages exchanged with the CEO of Pfizer. Brussels has until April 26 to respond on the search for the required messages.

“It is necessary to reform and clarify the rules of access to EU documents so that we do not have problems of this type again in the future. We see that there is a general resistance to applying the regulation to everything that is not a document in the sense traditional classic,” says Access Info director Helen Darbishire.


www.informacion.es

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