Textual content messages exchanged between European Fee President Ursula von der Leyen and a pharmaceutical boss throughout the COVID-19 pandemic have been seen by her high adviser and have seemingly been destroyed, the New York Instances reported on Friday (August 1, 2025).
| Photograph Credit score: AP
Textual content messages exchanged between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a pharmaceutical boss throughout the COVID-19 pandemic have been seen by her high adviser and have seemingly been destroyed, the New York Instances reported on Friday (August 1, 2025).
Von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla exchanged the messages as COVID-19 ravaged European communities from Portugal to Finland and the EU scrambled to purchase hundreds of thousands of exhausting to search out vaccines. She was beneath intense scrutiny to ship.
The U.S. newspaper took the European Union’s government department to court docket after it refused to share the messages beneath the bloc’s transparency legal guidelines. In Might, the court docket mentioned the fee had failed to supply a reputable clarification for declining entry.
In a letter to the Instances dated July 28, the fee mentioned von der Leyen’s head of cupboard, Bjoern Seibert, had final month examined the telephone she makes use of and its Sign app and “didn’t discover any messages akin to the outline given” within the newspaper’s request.
It mentioned Seibert additionally checked her telephone in 2021 and located the messages solely helped to make sure that calls between von der Leyen and Bourla may very well be organized as wanted, in order that they weren’t stored as official paperwork.
The fee insists textual content messages and different “ephemeral” digital communications don’t essentially represent paperwork of curiosity that must be saved or made public.
Von der Leyen herself was liable for deciding whether or not the texts constituted paperwork of worth and price retaining.
The fee additionally famous in its letter that her telephone has been changed “a number of instances” for the reason that messages have been exchanged, the final time in mid-2024. Her cupboard mentioned the outdated messages weren’t saved and the telephones have been “formatted and recycled.” Critics accuse von der Leyen and Seibert of centralizing energy within the EU’s highly effective government department, tightly controlling who works within the cupboards of the assorted coverage commissioners and vetting communications.
Von der Leyen survived a July 10 no-confidence vote within the European Parliament, the primary towards a fee president in over a decade, which was known as partly over the textual content messaging scandal dubbed Pfizergate, the alledged misuse of EU funds and uncertain allegations about election interference.
Revealed – August 01, 2025 08:07 pm IST
