Text messages related to Covid-19 vaccines between Commission's president and the CEO of pharmaceutical company must be accessible to the public, says European Ombudsman
The European Ombudsman has criticised how the Commission handled a request for public access to text messages between its President and the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. She has now asked it to do a more extensive search for the relevant messages. In response to the public access request by a journalist, the Commission said no record had been kept of such messages, which were related to the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines. The Ombudsman inquiry revealed that the Commission did not explicitly ask the President’s personal office (cabinet) to look for text messages. Instead, it asked her cabinet to look for documents that fulfil the Commission’s internal criteria for recording - text messages are not currently considered to meet these criteria. The Ombudsman found that this amounted to maladministration. “The narrow way in which this public access request was treated meant that no attempt was made to identify if any text messages existed. This falls short of reasonable expec