Lawsuit threatened: EU public prosecutor accuses von der Leyen of obstructing their investigation

The EU under Ursula von der Leyen has just concluded the rule of law case against Poland, and there is an accusation that the EU Commission itself is taking action against independent prosecutors. Is von der Leyen's Commission using similar means as the member states Hungary and Poland, which have long been attacked as allegedly lawless and semi-authoritarian?

Specifically, it concerns the European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO). They are investigating Commission President von der Leyen for involvement and cover-up in "Pfizergate", i.e. the backroom deals for vaccine purchases worth more than 35 billion euros from the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.

The EPPO is a relatively new EU institution, it aims to investigate financial crimes involving EU funds and from other EU institutions, and has the power to conduct cross-border investigations and to collect evidence - in von der Leyen's case, mainly text messages and emails; confiscate.

It is precisely in these investigations against the EU chief that the EPPO is now apparently being massively obstructed by the Commission. This is according to the EPPO's chief prosecutor, Laura Kövesi, who is now even threatening to take legal action against the EU Commission.

The background is a Commission project that plans to massively cut off funds from the EPPO, which the public prosecutor's office needs to investigate the allegations against von der Leyen. That is a total of five million euros.

Because when the EU launched the EPPO 2021, the EU authorities gave the new prosecutor's office access to its IT infrastructure, apparently on a large scale. This IT support worth five million is now being withdrawn, as the Commission announced. This means that the EPPO suddenly lacks enormous resources.

“The unilateral decision […] to stop providing the above-mentioned services to the EPPO on 31 December 2024 poses a risk that the independent public prosecutor of the Union will no longer be able to carry out its tasks and fulfil its mandate,” EU Chief Prosecutor Kövesi wrote in a letter to the European Commission, as reported by Politico.

“It is the Commission’s responsibility to refrain from any action that could jeopardise the achievement of the EPPO’s Treaty objectives of combating criminal offences affecting the financial interests of the Union,” she demanded. The Commission is currently denying the allegations.

Kövesi has now initiated a “friendly settlement procedure” (literally “friendly settlement procedure”), which, despite its supposedly innocuous name, represents the final step before an actual legal action against the European Commission. The fact that an EU institution is now suing the Commission is “unusual,” writes Politico . However, tensions had been rising for months.

It is certainly not without a certain irony that von der Leyen's Commission is now being accused of precisely what other eastern EU countries have long been accused of: an attack on the independence of the prosecution service. Poland, for example, has been repeatedly targeted in the past because politicians there have too much influence over judges and prosecutors. The EU state was accused, among other things, of the Minister of Justice exercising too much control over the public prosecution service. The PiS party, which was in power there until recently, used this to protect its own politicians from investigation, the accusation goes.

Suppression of unwelcome prosecutors who investigate the wrong people now seems to be the order of the day in Brussels, at least if Kövesi and her team are to be believed.