Proposal European Parliament to make contracts between Europe and corona vaccine suppliers public

The European parliament’s budgetary control committee wants the European Commission to be transparent on its public procurement of corona vaccines and other important economic, security or health crisis-related expenditure. The committee believes it should be clear who benefits from European money during this corona pandemic. This is stated in a report that the committee made public today. SOMO researcher Vincent Kiezebrink was invited to the presentation.

Last May, SOMO investigated a leaked contract between the European Union and pharma giant Moderna of 10.3 billion dollars. The contract revealed that the pharmaceutical giant had set up tax avoidance routes via Geneva and Delaware especially for this deal. If such agreements were public, it would be much easier to detect such abuses in the future.

Vincent Kiezebrink “It is great that the European Parliament now has come up with a proposal for transparency of their public procurements. This is an important first step. In addition, conditions should be set regarding affordability and accessibility of medicines developed with public money and the European Union should no longer make payments to letterbox companies in tax havens.”