The European Commission is guilty of “maladministration” for its refusal to release text messages sent between the EU President and the head of vaxx company Pfizer, the bloc’s ombudsman has found.
A failure on the end of the European Commission to release text messages sent between President Ursula von der Leyen and the head of Pfizer constitutes “maladministration”, the bloc’s own ombudsman has found.
The commission had previously rebuffed any suggestion that it was obliged to release correspondence between the two leaders, despite MEPs calling on the Commission President to resign over the scandal after the ombudsman initially found EU tsars guilty of wrongdoing.
However, despite protests from EU bigwigs, the bloc’s ombudsman has now doubled down on its initial decision, saying that the whole scandal represented a wake-up call on the issue of accountability within Europe.
“One year after the initial request by a journalist, the Commission has still not clarified whether messages reported to concern major vaccine procurement deals exist and whether the public is entitled to see them,” a press release by the organisation released on Thursday read.
However, while the ombudsman has ruled against the Commission, questions still remain as to what good such a ruling it is not backed up with consequences, with Romanian MEP Cristian Terhes slamming Europe for its lack of accountability.
“Ursula von der Leyen’s cabinet has been found responsible for maladministration but there have not been any practical consequences. All the unelected bureaucrats keep their job, while von der Leyen remains unaccountable for her acts, behaving with blatant transparency deficit,” the elected representative told Breitbart Europe.
“It’s outrageous that von der Leyen and her bureaucrats are lecturing EU member states on rule of law, while they despise any sense of transparency and accountability,” he continued. “To save Europe the Europeans must vote out of office all the politicians and parties who are supporting these autocrats.”
“At the end of the day, they are in those high offices to serve the people, not that the people would serve them,” the European Conservatives and Reformists Group member went on to say.
The issue of transparency, or more specifically, a significant lack of it, has become a central issue in regard to the EU’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, with elected officials in Brussels repeated complaining of how little the bloc revealed in regards to its dealings with vaccine companies.
“Is this the kind of Europe that we want? Where an unelected by the people president of the European Commission is ‘negotiating’ — personally — with the head of a private company that will affect our basic fundamental human rights?” Terhes himself previously asked during a press conference on the issue, at which he showed off a contract between the EU and a vaccine manufacturer that was released with so many redactions that the majority of text on many pages was completely blacked out.
“This is the great transparency of the European Union,” he said, holding the pages up to those present, before saying that the bloc was in a “deep crisis” over a lack of transparency.
Another MEP, Ivan Vilibor Sinčić of Croatia, meanwhile emphasised that Europe had found itself in a “pandemic of corruption”.