by Michael Hollister
The Briefing was published exclusively by HAINTZ.media on September 15, 2026.
2.122 words * 10 minutes readingtime
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Judge With A Stock Portfolio
Why the European Union’s most powerful court safeguards its own impartiality less rigorously than any comparable supreme court – and who benefits
Anyone sending an encrypted message in Europe today is expected to accept that its contents may be scanned before it is sent. Anyone opening a bank account discloses their financial circumstances. Anyone serving in the Bundestag reports outside income. With every legislative term, citizens face growing obligations of transparency – directed downward, toward individuals required to account for themselves to the state apparatus.
At the institution that decides the fundamental rules governing the lives of half a billion people, the opposite applies. Some 90 jurists in Luxembourg can compel governments to rewrite laws and order corporations to pay billions – or overturn such claims. Their judgments cannot be appealed and are binding on all 27 member states. In June 2026, a consortium of European news organizations led by Investigate Europe, including Follow the Money, Le Monde, and taz, investigated how the Court safeguards the integrity of its members. The finding was not that judgments had demonstrably been bought. It was something more fundamental: a system of oversight weaker than that of any comparable supreme court.
The question, therefore, is not whether the judges can be bought – there is no evidence of that, and the investigators explicitly emphasize this. The question is why Europe’s most powerful court protects its impartiality less rigorously than the Bundestag protects that of its members, less rigorously than the United States protects that of its federal judges, and less rigorously than Strasbourg and Karlsruhe protect that of their judges. And who benefits from keeping it that way?
The Advocate General and Her Shares
Juliane Kokott is one of the Court’s most prominent figures and an authority on competition law. At the same time, she holds a diversified stock portfolio that includes three major pharmaceutical companies: AstraZeneca, BioNTech, and Merck. This violates no rule. The Court’s Code of Conduct merely requires jurists to declare their financial interests upon taking office and update them every three years, report a potential conflict when a case is assigned, and recuse themselves if necessary.
The reason the investigation places particular emphasis on Kokott is a matter of chronology. In 2019, she was assigned a case between the French pharmaceutical manufacturer Servier and the European Commission. At its core was the question of whether Servier had granted benefits to generic drug manufacturers in order to delay their market entry. Two years after receiving the case, she acquired shares in the three pharmaceutical companies. In 2022, she delivered her legal opinion in the Servier case. Such opinions are no mere formality: judges follow approximately 80 percent of advocates general’s opinions in their final judgments.
Kokott rejects the criticism, and her response belongs in the record. She said she had “strictly followed all relevant rules … in particular those on impartiality and conflicts of interest.” Her opinion had not favored the company; she had argued that the agreements between the Servier group and generic pharmaceutical companies constituted restrictions of competition, which did not benefit any branded-drug manufacturer. Moreover, she owned only five AstraZeneca shares, five Merck shares, and seven BioNTech shares, purchased to “contribute – to a very limited extent” to the development of Covid-19 vaccines. She did not believe a conflict of interest existed.
The objection lies one level deeper, and the Code itself articulates it. It requires jurists to avoid any situation “which may give rise to a conflict of interest … or may be perceived as such.” The OECD defines a conflict as a situation in which private interests “could improperly influence” the performance of official duties; a perceived conflict exists when those interests could influence those duties, even if they ultimately do not. The standard is not proven influence, but appearance. A judge who owns shares in a publicly traded company has an interest in an outcome on which that judge helps decide. Whether the holding consists of five shares or 5,000 does not alter that perception.
In any event, the published declarations almost never disclose how many shares a jurist owns or what they are worth. Silje Hermansen, who researches judicial politics at the University of Copenhagen, draws a straightforward conclusion: “The court should consider a reform where judges sell their shares before taking office.” There is no financial reason not to do so – no one in the EU institutions is paid more generously, and none of these jurists requires an investment portfolio to secure retirement. There is no evidence that Juliane Kokott derived any benefit from a case. Under the logic of the Code itself, that is not the decisive measure.
Oversight That Is Not Oversight
Kokott is not an isolated case, but an example. More than 40 percent of the 92 serving judges and advocates general have declared private financial interests; collectively, they hold interests in 124 companies and funds. These include oil companies Eni, Total, and Repsol; weight-loss drug manufacturer Novo Nordisk; aviation giants Boeing and Airbus; and US technology corporation Amazon. Financial-sector holdings are the most common, ranging from European banks to the US conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway. In several instances, jurists worked on cases involving companies in which they had declared an interest – or those companies’ direct competitors.
The decisive issue is not the list, but what happens to it: nothing. The system relies almost entirely on self-assessment. A member identifies a possible conflict and reports it to the president, who takes the declaration into account when assigning cases. There is no external review and no published explanation. The person being monitored monitors themselves, and no one checks the result.
That is the real contradiction. The Code requires jurists to avoid even the appearance of a conflict – one of the strictest standards a body of rules can impose. At the same time, the Court provides no authority to assess that appearance. The standard is maximal; the mechanism for enforcing it is minimal. Alberto Alemanno, a professor of EU law, puts it plainly: “The Court of Justice of the European Union still falls short of the transparency standards now expected of high supreme courts.”
The Court’s approach to transparency also cuts transparency in half. Declarations remain public only while they are current. Once a judge updates a declaration, the previous version is reclassified as a judicial document and disappears – precisely the version needed to track changes in that judge’s financial circumstances. Investigators obtained earlier versions only through internet archives. At the time of the investigation, almost one-third of the declarations were more than three years old, contrary to the Court’s own rule. Shortly after the journalists requested comment, more than 35 disclosures were uploaded again. Despite an expensive redesign, the Court’s website does not even allow users to search by an individual judge’s name.
A Court spokesperson responded that “judges and advocates general of the Court of Justice are citizens who have private lives and, therefore, decide themselves on how they wish to manage their possessions.” There was “nothing wrong with owning shares/interests insofar as it does not affect the good administration of justice.” Recusal, the spokesperson added, had never been necessary.
That statement can be read in two directions. In a system that has allowed judges with substantial financial interests to rule on the relevant industries for decades, not one has ever recused themselves.
Three Courts, Three Answers – and Luxembourg
None of these weaknesses is a law of nature. Other supreme courts confronted the same risks and addressed them. The Court of Justice of the European Union combines vulnerabilities that other institutions have already corrected individually.
Strasbourg. The European Court of Human Rights faced the same problem: judges whose re-election depends on the states that nominated them can find themselves caught in a conflict of loyalty. In 2010, it introduced nonrenewable nine-year terms, explicitly to eliminate that dependency. A judge who knows that re-election is impossible has no one to please. The CJEU continues to appoint its members for renewable six-year terms.
Washington. The US Supreme Court was long regarded as a prime example of weak integrity safeguards. Only on November 13, 2023, and under public pressure, did it adopt a Code of Conduct – which itself was criticized as toothless. Yet US federal judges are already subject to two rules that do not exist in Luxembourg: a statutory obligation to recuse themselves when they hold a financial interest in the subject matter of a dispute, and annual financial disclosures that remain permanently accessible. The CJEU requires self-disclosure every three years and allows previous versions to disappear. US judges disclose annually – and what they disclose remains available.
Karlsruhe. Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court has set out its integrity safeguards in public guidelines. The standard governing impartiality is codified in law: what matters is not whether a judge is actually biased, but whether the appearance of insufficient impartiality is avoided, assessed from the perspective of the parties to the proceedings. The very perception that the CJEU dismisses by invoking its judges’ private lives is the legally decisive standard in Karlsruhe.
Three courts, three answers to three risks. The Court of Justice of the European Union has adopted none of them in a comparable form. The timing makes this more striking. Its current Code of Conduct dates from 2021 – by which time Strasbourg had long completed its reform and the debate in Washington was already underway. The CJEU drafted its rules with full knowledge of the alternatives and chose the weaker option.
One objection must be acknowledged: the Court of Justice is not a national constitutional court, but a supranational institution encompassing 27 legal cultures. A centrally enforced disclosure regime faces genuine obstacles in that setting. The objection carries weight – but it arguably reverses the conclusion. Precisely because this Court exercises more power over more people than any single national supreme court, and because its judgments are final, its unique position argues for stronger safeguards, not weaker ones.
It is also noteworthy that General Court President Marc van der Woude was barred from owning individual shares when he worked at a private law firm – he was once subject to stricter rules than those he now administers. He has announced plans to improve the assessment of conflicts of interest in case assignments, including with the help of artificial intelligence. That is more than a defensive response; it is an acknowledgment that the present system is insufficient.
Pressure is also coming from outside. European Ombudswoman Teresa Anjinho has opened an inquiry, while the Court president has announced an internal review. Anjinho’s inquiry initially concerns only the refusal to release historical declarations – a fragment of the problem, not its core. Whether it produces a requirement to sell shares before taking office, longer terms, an external oversight body, or merely better case-assignment software remains to be seen.
Finding
The conclusion is not a judgment against individual people. There is no evidence that Juliane Kokott benefited from a case, and anyone claiming otherwise goes beyond the facts. The finding concerns the system, not the person. The most powerful court in the European Union safeguards its own impartiality through a principle that other supreme courts have deemed inadequate and replaced: those being monitored monitor themselves, and no one verifies the result.
Who benefits can be identified without alleging intent. Self-disclosure alone saves the Court from having to establish an independent reviewing body. The disappearance of earlier declarations prevents changes in judges’ financial circumstances from being documented. Each individual rule may be justified in the name of judicial independence. Taken together, they form a system whose most reliable beneficiary is opacity itself.
This closes the circle back to the asymmetry described at the beginning. The same power structure that demands ever more comprehensive transparency from citizens – down to encrypted messages and the last euro of outside income – grants itself the opposite at the top. Transparency below, an honor system above. That strikes at a fundamental democratic assumption: power should be subject to the strictest oversight where it is greatest.
The finding extends beyond the cases presented here. A former Court president who now helps select new judges while receiving a senior FIFA salary, even as the Court hears cases involving the football federation; a former minister who helped decide a tax case arising from his own time in government; a judge who ruled on a bank where he held an account. None of these constitutes a rule violation. They are the system.
The Briefing was published exclusively by HAINTZ.media on September 15, 2026.
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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
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Investigate Europe. “Investigating the EU’s Top Court: What We Found, How We Did It, and What the Story Helped to Change.” July 23, 2026. https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/investigating-the-eus-top-court-what-we-found-what-changed-and-how-we-did-it
Follow the Money. “How the EU’s Top Judges Are Tied to the Markets They Oversee.” June 30, 2026. https://www.ftm.eu/articles/eu-judges-investments-raise-conflict-of-interest-concerns
Court of Justice of the European Union. “Code of Conduct for Members and Former Members of the Court of Justice of the European Union.” Official Journal of the European Union C 397, September 30, 2021. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ:C:2021:397:TOC
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Congressional Research Service. “The Supreme Court’s New Ethics Code.” November 13, 2023. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11078
Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. “Guidelines of Conduct for Justices of the Federal Constitutional Court.” https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/DE/DasBundesverfassungsgericht/RichterinnenRichter/Verhaltensleitlinien/verhaltensleitlinie.html
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