von Michael Hollister
Exklusive Veröffentlichung nur bei Michael Hollister am 27. September 2026
4.729 Wörter * 25 Minuten Lesezeit
Briefing Format of the In-Depth Analysis, exclusively by HAINTZ.media on September 15, 2026 with around 10 minutes readingtime:
Honor Among Shareholders
How the EU’s Most Powerful Court Entrusts Its Integrity to Self-Reporting-and What Other High Courts Have Long Done Differently
Anyone who sends an encrypted message in Europe today faces plans to have its contents scanned automatically before it is sent. Anyone who opens a bank account must disclose their financial circumstances. Anyone who serves in the German Bundestag must disclose outside income. Citizens’ obligation to be transparent toward the state grows with every legislative term, and it grows downward-toward the individual who owes the apparatus an account of themselves. Yet at the place where the fundamental rules governing this market of half a billion people are decided, a different principle applies: the honor system.
Fewer than 100 people in Luxembourg wield a degree of power possessed by scarcely any other body in the world. The roughly 90 members of the Court of Justice of the European Union can compel governments to rewrite laws, order corporations to pay billions or overturn such claims, and have the final word on the law of the world’s largest trading bloc. There is no appeal against their judgments; those judgments are final and binding on all 27 member states. An investigation published in June 2026 by the journalism network Investigate Europe-conducted jointly with EUobserver, Follow the Money, Le Monde, Le Soir, Público, and taz-examined how this court safeguards the integrity of its members. Its finding is not a scandal in the sense of proven rulings bought and paid for. It is something more fundamental: a finding about the design of an oversight system built more weakly than that of any comparable constitutional or supreme court.
The central question of this article is therefore not whether the judges in Luxembourg can be bought-there is no evidence of that, and Investigate Europe explicitly emphasizes as much. The question is this: Why does Europe’s most powerful court safeguard its own impartiality less rigorously than the German Bundestag safeguards that of its members, less rigorously than the United States safeguards that of its federal judges, and less rigorously than the European Court of Human Rights safeguards that of its own judges? And who benefits from this remaining unchanged? Answering that requires two things: a close look at what the investigation uncovered and a comparison with courts that faced the same risks and chose a different course.
What the Investigation Found
The Court’s Code of Conduct requires its jurists to avoid any situation “which may give rise to a conflict of interest … or may be perceived as such.” In a six-month review of public transparency documents, Investigate Europe examined how far reality falls short of that standard. The result: More than 40 percent of the 92 sitting judges and advocates general have declared private financial interests.
The amount of work this analysis required already says something about the Court. Despite an expensive redesign, the Court’s website cannot even be searched by the names of individual judges. To compare the jurists’ interests with the cases they had handled, the network worked with the IUROPA research project, which has built the most comprehensive database of the Court’s case law to date. Tens of thousands of decisions covering the period from January 01, 2018, through December 31, 2024, were extracted and cross-referenced with the declared holdings. The methodological review examined two configurations: direct matches, in which a jurist had declared an interest in a party directly involved in a case, and sector matches, in which the interest concerned a competitor in the same industry. The investigation also compared the jurists’ biographies with their national affiliations to identify potential bias in proceedings involving their home countries.
The range is considerable. According to the most recent disclosures, 36 jurists declared holdings in 124 companies and funds. They include the oil companies Eni, Total, and Repsol; weight-loss drug manufacturer Novo Nordisk; aviation giants Boeing and Airbus; and U.S. technology company Amazon. Financial-sector holdings are the most common by far, ranging from European institutions such as Erste Bank, Swedbank, and Bank of Valletta to the U.S. conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway. Five jurists alone account for half of all declared interests: Malta’s Ramona Frendo, whose April 2026 declaration lists 18 positions-the longest list of any member-Estonia’s Lauri Madise, Finland’s Tuula Pynnä, German Advocate General Juliane Kokott, and Austria’s Andreas Kumin. Luxembourgish judge Dean Spielmann, in turn, declared interests in several major corporations in his April 2026 filing. Yet the published declarations almost always omit the scale and nature of the holdings. As a rule, the public cannot determine how many shares a judge owns or what they are worth.
Investigate Europe found that, in several cases, jurists worked on proceedings involving companies-or their competitors-in which they had declared a financial interest. Many more sat on cases involving sectors in which they also held investments. The investigation found striking gaps in the public disclosures, a system in which cases are assigned at both levels-the higher Court of Justice and the lower General Court-without external scrutiny, and potential risks to impartiality arising from judges’ ties to their national governments.
Precision is essential here. There is no indication that any of these cases involved an actual conflict of interest, and no evidence that a judge derived a financial benefit from a ruling. The finding lies one level deeper, in the area the Code itself describes in terms of perception. Alberto Alemanno, professor of European law at HEC Paris and the College of Europe, put it this way: “The Court of Justice of the European Union still falls short of the transparency standards now expected of high supreme courts.” The President of the General Court announced that an internal committee would review the findings. European Ombudswoman Teresa Anjinho opened an inquiry.
The German Case: Kokott and the Pharmaceutical Shares
Juliane Kokott is a prominent figure at the Court and an authority on competition law. At the same time, she holds a diversified stock portfolio. According to her latest public declaration, it includes a German rail-infrastructure company, a physical gold fund, and three major pharmaceutical companies: AstraZeneca, BioNTech, and Merck.
Continue reading your article with a HOLLISTER subscription.
Subscribe here.
Already a subscriber?
Sign In.
This publication answers to its readers – and no one else. Become a member for $5 or a patron for $15 per month, support genuinely independent journalism, and receive full access to all published analyses.
About the Author
Michael Hollister
is a geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist. He served six years in the German military, including peacekeeping deployments in the Balkans (SFOR, KFOR), followed by 14 years in IT security management. His analysis draws on primary sources to examine European militarization, Western intervention policy, and shifting power dynamics across Asia. A particular focus of his work lies in Southeast Asia, where he investigates strategic dependencies, spheres of influence, and security architectures. Hollister combines operational insider perspective with uncompromising systemic critique – beyond opinion journalism. His work appears on his bilingual website (German/English) www.michael-hollister.com and in investigative outlets across the German-speaking world and the Anglosphere.
Sources
Investigative Basis
- Investigate Europe, June 30, 2026 – “Top EU Judges’ Financial Holdings Raise Troubling Questions”
- Investigate Europe, July 23, 2026 – “Investigating the EU’s Top Court: What We Found, How We Did It, and What the Story Helped to Change”
Court and Primary Documents
- Court of Justice of the European Union, September 30, 2021 – Code of Conduct, Official Journal C 397
- Court of Justice of the European Union, December 14, 2023 – Judgment in Case C-457/21 P, Commission v. Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Amazon.com and Others
- Panel Provided for by Article 255 TFEU-Composition
Comparison: Other High Courts
- U.S. Supreme Court, November 13, 2023 – Code of Conduct for Justices: Congressional Research Service Assessment
- European Court of Human Rights – Protocol No. 14 to the European Convention on Human Rights: Nonrenewable Judicial Terms
- German Federal Constitutional Court – Guidelines for the Conduct of Justices
Further Reporting and Analysis
- Follow the Money, June 30, 2026 – “How the EU’s Top Judges Are Tied to the Markets They Oversee”
- EUobserver-Reporting on the Investigation
- The Good Lobby – “Can EU Judges Rule Fairly on Companies They Own Shares In?”
- Politico – “Top FIFA Official Also Holds Key EU Court Function”
© Michael Hollister – All rights reserved. Redistribution, publication or reuse of this text requires express written permission from the author. For licensing inquiries, please contact the author via www.michael-hollister.com.
