The case of Ursula von der Leyen:
The non-elected president of the EU
by
Prof. Dr. Robert Gorter
June 29th, 2023
After a criminal complaint in Belgium against the President of the European Commission, the so-called SMS case is now taking a new turn. The judge in charge of the investigation will likely be able to access the secret messages exchanged between Ursula von der Leyen and Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer if they are not deleted………
The vaccine agreements reached via SMS between EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Albert Bourla, CEO of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, have caused much ink to flow, not least because many legal experts argue that the EU Commission, which is not elected, does not have the mandate to negotiate such matters.
Due to this suspicion of negotiations “outside the framework” of the signed mega-contract for the purchase of vaccines, it would be a crime not to present these text messages, which are legally considered administrative documents and must therefore be registered. If they are erased, President Ursula von der Leyen will have to answer to court as the responsible head of a government agency. The case could reveal the existence of “a corruption pact”, according to French lawyer Diane Protat, but has received very little coverage in the mainstream media.
Several alternative media outlets have written about the administrative twists and turns of the case when members of the EU parliament twice unsuccessfully invited the CEO of Pfizer to account for himself before the European Parliament. He accepted the first invitation but canceled at the last minute, sending a subordinate, Janine Small, instead. When asked directly, she admitted that they had not tested whether the vaccine was effective against transmission, but stubbornly refused to disclose the financial terms of the agreement.
Conflict of interest? Corruption?
An investigation has been ongoing by the European authorities since October 2022. Subsequently, in December, the BonSens Association filed a lawsuit in New York State Court to have the infamous text messages handed over as they have serious suspicions against the President of the European Commission regarding a conflict of interest or even corruption.
It is a fact that no official document precisely spells out the official terms of the negotiation of the gigantic third contract for the purchase of Pfizer vaccines, for 1.8 billion doses, at a cost of more than 70 billion euros.
Something else not worth mentioning by the mainstream media is that on January 25, 2023, the New York Times sued the European Commission on the same grounds to gain access to text messages.
On April 5, 2023, lobbyist Frédéric Baldan filed a new complaint, this time as a criminal case in Belgium, with investigating judge Frenay in Liège. His complaint relates directly to the issue of the third contract for the procurement of vaccines and the fact that the negotiations were apparently conducted outside the usual framework for negotiating this type of contract, with the steering group responsible for evaluating the offers being bypassed. However, Ursula von der Leyen has no mandate that gives her the right to intervene in this type of contract negotiation.
Belgian law has a peculiarity. A public official who arbitrarily violates a constitution risks imprisonment (Article 151 of the Penal Code). In this case, it concerns the right to give every citizen access to administrative documents, according to the principle of public access.
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the EU Commission, and her husband Heiko von der Leyen, who was exposed in 2020 as the scientific head of the US biotechnology company Orgenesis, were involved in the development of mRNA vaccines against Covid-19. The EU bought billions of euros worth of mRNA vaccines during the pandemic. (youtube screenshot)
The complaint thus originates from a private individual and concerns civil liability for the improper exercise of authority, exceeding authority, destruction of public documents, unlawful partiality, and corruption. The complaint is therefore aimed at all eventualities.
This case is a real earthquake on the European political scene, which has already been hit by allegations of corruption against EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakidou and the QatarGate scandal.
Chaos
Even if the EU Commission did not want the (expensive) economic conditions for purchasing vaccines to be clarified by citizens or even EU parliamentarians, a legal solution could be found at the level of the state and its jurisdiction, in this case Belgium.
In addition, a dozen European states, including Poland and Bulgaria, are now questioning the purchase price of vaccine doses and are concerned about the obligation to recommend products that, in addition to widespread doubt about their real effectiveness, are no longer useful because of the Covid-19 Pandemic. The -19 epidemic is over.
In France, 46 million doses are still in the warehouse of the health administration and will be lost. There are more than 30 million doses in Italy and more than 10 million in Belgium. A real waste. How can one support the idea – or how could one support it – that more doses have to be purchased under threat of a lawsuit for non-compliance with a commercial contract … that no one gets to see?
This situation has left all the cards in the hands of the pharmaceutical industry, first and foremost Pfizer, which has obtained more than three-quarters of sales contracts. This leads MEP Michèle Rivasi of Europe Ecology-The Greens (EELV) to say:
“It seems that it is the pharmaceutical companies that are pulling the strings at the EU Commission.”
She has covered the case in several French media, such as the left-wing newspaper l’Humanité, which has presented the topic on her YouTube channel. The newspaper Valeurs Actuelles raised the subject in a column by Patricia de Sagazan. The EU news site EURACTIV covered the subject. Sud-Radio also paid attention to this news thanks to André Bercoff, who left the floor to Diane Protat and Frédéric Baldan.
Ursula von der Leyen, the unelected president of the European Commission, has some disturbing skeletons in her family wardrobe. Its political roots in Nazi Germany explain the European Union’s insane warlike agenda towards Russia under its leadership and its utter subservience to the US imperialist objective of conquering Moscow, writes Finian Cunningham Author Evan Reif explains how her political father Ernst Albrecht packed his regional government with unreconstructed Nazis and former Wehrmacht officers when he was governor of Lower Saxony in the 1980s.
Ursula von der Leyen’s family derived much of its industrial wealth from close association with Hitler’s Third Reich. Her aristocratic family also intermarried with slave-owning cotton planters in the American South. That legacy benefited not only Ursula’s elite education but also her meteoric rise in German politics. She became Germany’s Defense Minister from 2013-2019 despite having no formal background in the military. Under her tutelage, the German army was massively rearmed and also got caught up in corruption scandals. At the end of 2019, she was appointed President of the European Commission, the highest political post in the European Union. This happened without a vote of the German parliament, so little confidence was had in her eligibility. She has spearheaded the US-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia with remarkably bellicose anti-Russian rhetoric. Her zeal to pursue hostility towards Russia is consistent with the Nazi ideology her father indulged in.
Ursula von der Leyen has demonstrated an astonishing “ability” to “fail upwards,” as Evan Reif wryly points out. The only explanation for this inappropriate political rise, despite its incompetence, plagiarism, and corruption, is the help of a powerful network – the transatlantic US-led NATO alliance and its intelligence agencies, like Die Brücke / The Atlantic Bridge.
A catastrophic silence for democracy
The subject could quickly turn from a soap opera into a major legal and political scandal. The President of the EU Commission, who already has a turbulent past with the German judiciary from when she was the country’s defense minister, has shown many signs of a close friendship with Albert Bourla, not least through her man, who works in the pharmaceutical sector.
The text messages exchanged must be shown to the public so as not to further discredit the EU institutions, which is short-circuited by von der Leyen’s desire to handle this matter himself. The EU institutions suffer from a seemingly worrying structural weakness, namely that they are too exposed to the power behind industrial and financial lobby groups.
Since the beginning of the “health crisis” in 2020, the mainstream media has shown clear inaction on these issues. The ethical rules for journalists laid down in the Munich Declaration of 1971 aim to guarantee citizens objective and factual information about the dangers threatening the public good and the public interest. The current journalistic corps often seems to have forgotten these rules.
This silence is serious for democracy and stability in the political sphere in Europe. While citizens’ distrust of the media in Europe continues to grow, this situation also damages the image of the EU and its Member States, which fail to respond to the shortcomings in the supranational institutions that now largely govern the countries.