The EU's IT agency, EU-Lisa, has filed a lawsuit in Estonia against the three-company consortium — IBM, French IT firm Atos, and Italian defence contractor Leonardo — responsible for building and maintaining the bloc's Entry/Exit System. The case, submitted on 22 December 2025, targets delivery delays during system development and seeks to protect the agency's financial interests under its contract terms. The lawsuit was buried in EU-Lisa's annual accounts and first reported by the Financial Times. The EES launched in October 2025, requiring all non-Schengen travellers entering the 29-country zone to have their faces photographed and fingerprints scanned. The system covers roughly 420 million border crossings annually. In practice, the rollout has been ugly: airports report malfunctioning kiosks, regular system outages, and waiting times stretching to three hours at peak periods. Some passengers have missed flights. The European Commission has distanced itself from the lawsuit, noting it is not a party to the case and that it concerns development-phase delays, not current operations. EU-Lisa echoed this framing, insisting the legal action has "no impact on the functioning" of the EES, which it describes as "fully operational across Europe." The gap between that claim and the reported outages and three-hour queues is doing a lot of work. This is a familiar pattern in large-scale government IT procurement: a politically-mandated system with a fixed launch date, a multi-company consortium diffusing accountability, and a launch that proceeds regardless of readiness because the political cost of delay exceeds the political cost of dysfunction. The consortium model — IBM (US), Atos (France), Leonardo (Italy) — spans three countries and two continents, making contractual enforcement and blame assignment structurally difficult. The core question is who absorbs the cost of a system that launched late and broken. Travellers bear it directly through missed flights and hours-long queues. EU taxpayers bear it through the procurement spend and now litigation costs. The consortium members face contractual remedies but have already been paid for development work. The lawsuit signals EU-Lisa is trying to claw back value, but the structural incentives in mega-procurement — where contractors are too embedded to replace and too large to punish meaningfully — tend to favour the vendors. The political dimension matters too. The EES was conceived as a security enhancement, but its visible failure at airports feeds anti-EU sentiment and undermines public trust in the bloc's capacity to execute large-scale projects. Every three-hour queue is a tangible grievance that populist movements can point to. The system's dysfunction is not just an IT failure — it is a governance failure with compounding political costs. Watch for whether the Estonian court proceedings reveal the scale of the financial claim, whether any consortium member faces exclusion from future EU contracts, and whether the operational problems force a partial rollback or redesign. The system is live and expanding; fixing it mid-flight is harder than building it right the first time.
