Will the Fallout from "Qatargate" (and now also "Moroccogate") Splatter the European Commission? | naked capitalism
www.nakedcapitalism.com
As the Qatargate scandal widens, questions are being asked as to whether its reverberations will reach the EU's executive branch, the European Commission. Recent revelations suggest the EU's Chief Diplomat Josep Borrell could be in the mix.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/68805

Politico describes Qatargate as the biggest corruption scandal to hit the EU in years, though it faces a run for its money from the blossoming scandal over the Commission’s deeply opaque dealings with Pfizer and other vaccine makers, which is now the subject of an investigation by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. The EU’s ombudsman Emily O’Reilly branded the Commission’s refusal to disclose the text messages between von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla as “maladministration.”

In contrast to Qatargate, that scandal has been studiously ignored by Europe’s legacy media despite the staggering sums of money involved (tens of billions of dollars to date to buy up to 1.8 billion COVID-19 vaccines), the number of people affected (anyone who pays taxes in the EU and felt compelled by the EU’s vaccine passport rules to take a medical product they didn’t want) and the seniority of those implicated, including Von der Leyen herself and Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.