The EU Is Suing IBM, Atos and Leonardo Over the Border System That Queued Europe's Airports

The European Union is taking its own border-technology contractor to court. According to the Financial Times, EU-Lisa -- the agency that operates Europe's large-scale IT systems -- has sued IBM, French IT group Atos and Italian defence contractor Leonardo over repeated delays in building the Entry/Exit System, the biometric border platform that records every crossing by a non-EU national into the Schengen area.

The suit was filed in December 2025 at Harju County Court in Estonia, where EU-Lisa is based, and has not been scheduled for a hearing. A court spokesperson confirmed the civil case is registered. EU-Lisa declined to discuss pending litigation but said the proceedings have no impact on the functioning of the system, and the European Commission stressed that the dispute concerns delays during development rather than day-to-day operation. IBM did not respond to a request for comment; Atos and Leonardo declined to comment.

The contract dates to 2019, when the agency awarded a six-year deal covering implementation and maintenance of the central system to a consortium of IBM Belgium, Atos Belgium and Leonardo. By 2021 its value had risen from €142 million to €212 million. Letters seen by the FT show the fight over penalties has run for years: in October 2021 the two Belgian entities contested both the principle and the calculation of a fine, blaming external factors including the pandemic, and in February 2022 all three pushed back on new deadlines the agency had set, writing that working to an unrealistic plan would leave every party frustrated and criticising EU-Lisa's overall governance.

The operational record is what made the dispute public. The system was supposed to go live in 2022 and only became fully operational this year. Rollout was plagued by hardware and software faults, most notoriously fingerprint scanners that failed when travellers' hands were sweaty, producing queues of several hours at airports in several member states. Some countries are still procuring replacement scanners.

For the vendors the exposure is reputational as much as financial. EU-Lisa's annual reports have acknowledged delivery problems and rising maintenance costs, and the agency says it is pursuing contractual and legal remedies to protect its financial interests. Penalties on public IT megaprojects are routinely written into contracts and rarely tested in court, which is what makes the Estonian filing unusual: it turns a governance argument into a public record of who promised what, and when.

The wider lesson concerns biometric infrastructure, the layer where AI-adjacent systems meet 29 national border agencies at once. The technology worked well enough to be deployed; the programme did not work well enough to be delivered on time, and the cost of that gap is now being argued in front of a judge in Tallinn rather than settled between procurement officers. Whatever the court decides, the case sets a marker for the next generation of EU digital identity and border projects, several of which are already behind schedule.