BRUSSELS (AP) — Text messages exchanged between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a pharmaceutical boss during theCOVID-19pandemic were seen by her top adviser and have likely been destroyed, the New York Times reported Friday. 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 buy millions of hard to find vaccines. She was under intense scrutiny to deliver. The U.S. newspaper took the European Union's executive branchto courtafter it refused to share the messages under the bloc's transparency laws. In May, the court said the commission had failed to provide a credible explanation for declining access. In a letter to the Times dated July 28, the commission said von der Leyen's head of cabinet, Bjoern Seibert, had last month examined the phone she uses and its Signal app and "did not find any messages corresponding to the description given" in the newspaper's request. It said Seibert also checked her phone in 2021 and found the messages only helped to ensure that calls between von der Leyen and Bourla could be arranged as needed, so they were not kept as official documents. The commission insists text messages and other "ephemeral" electronic communications do not necessarily constitute documents of interest that should be saved or made public. Von der Leyen herself was responsible for deciding whether the texts constituted documents of value and worth keeping. The commission also noted in its letter that her phone has been replaced "several times" since the messages were exchanged, the last time in mid-2024. Her cabinet said the old messages were not saved and the phones were "formatted and recycled." Critics accuse von der Leyen and Seibert of centralizing power in the EU's powerful executive branch, tightly controlling who works in the cabinets of the various policy commissioners and vetting communications. Von der Leyen survived a July 10no-confidence votein the European Parliament, the first against a commission president in over a decade, which was called in part over the text messaging scandal dubbed Pfizergate, the alledged misuse of EU funds and doubtful allegations about election interference.
