At issue is an appeal lodged with the court by the Espírito Santo Financial group against a judgment from the EU’s general court that, on 26 April 2018, only partly upheld a decision by the ECB to deny access to certain documentation on resolutions relating to Banco Espírito Santo, a Portuguese bank that was wound up in August 2014 after reporting billions of euros of first-half losses.

"In its conclusions today, the Estonian advocate-general, P. Pikamäe, invites the Court of Justice to annul, in a future judgment, the first point of the judgment of the General Court, in so far as it annulled the decision of the ECB of 1 April 2015, which partially refused access to certain documents relating to the decision of the ECB of 1 August 2014 on BES, in which it refused access to the amount of the credit contained in the minutes that recorded the decision of the ECB Council of 28 July 2014," the Court of Justice said in a statement.

"In order for the ECB to be able to carry out its tasks autonomously and effectively, it is necessary to preserve the decision-making process of its organs from any external pressure, which can be ensured through the confidentiality of this process," the advocate-general has ruled, highlighting in his recommendation that, "according to the intentional choice of Member States, in the context of the ECB Council's decision-making process, the principle of transparency yields to the principle of confidentiality."

In the judgment in question, the general court had ruled partially in favour of the Espírito Santo Financial group, determining that "the decision of the European Central Bank (ECB) of 1 April 2015 which partially denies access to certain documents relating to the ECB's decision [of] 1 August 2014 on Banco Espirito Santo SA is annulled to the extent that it refused access to the amount of the appropriation entered in the statements of the minutes of the decision of the Governing Council of the ECB of 28 July 2014, and the information deleted in the Commission's proposals of the ECB executive board of 28 July and 01 August 2014.”

Access to documentation on the minutes of the ECB's meetings – on 28 July 2014 and 1 August 2014 – in which decisions were made that led to the end of BES’s counterparty status and which led to the resolution of the bank, could now be sealed, if the Court of Justice follows the recommendations from the advocate-general delivered on Wednesday.

Decisions of the General Court may be appealed, where matters of law are concerned, to the Court of Justice.