EU Agency eu-LISA Sues IBM and Two Other Developers: Border System Case Concerns Development Delays, Not Airport Queues
The Financial Times reported on November 9 that eu-LISA, the EU agency for the operational management of large-scale IT systems, has sued the three consortium members that built the EU Entry/Exit System (EES), IBM Belgium, Atos Belgium and Italy's Leonardo, in Harju County Court, Estonia. The case was filed on December 22, 2025; the amount claimed is undisclosed and no hearing had been scheduled.
EES is the biometric system registering fingerprints and photographs of non-EU travellers at the external borders of 29 Schengen countries. It began a progressive rollout on October 12, 2025 and became fully operational on April 10, 2026. In the summer of 2026, airports across southern Europe saw queues of several hours and missed flights, with airport and airline groups reporting peak waits of up to five hours; Lisbon airport had earlier suspended the system after queues reached seven hours.
The lawsuit itself is not about the queues. Both eu-LISA and the European Commission stress that the case concerns only repeated delivery delays during development, including missed deadlines and disputed warnings and fines; the consortium had contested a fine in October 2021, citing Covid and other external factors. Both also say EES is functioning normally today and the case has no impact on its operation. The contract, awarded in 2019 for six years at about 142 million euros, had risen to about 212 million euros by 2021 with additional services and requirements.
Source: Financial Times
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：欧洲一机场的护照查验（资料图）。图：<a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Uncle_sam205" tit，CC BY-SA 4.0，经维基共享资源 / passport control at a European airport (file photo). Photo by <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Uncle_sam205" tit, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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