The horrendous airport queues of summer 2026 have finally turned into a court case. The European Union is suing IBM, Atos and Leonardo over long waits – but these are the years of delays in building the Entry/Exit System (EES), the biometric border check that left British holidaymakers queuing for hours across southern Europe. (Not you, Greece, you were awesome because you turned the whole system off for us).
The claim was brought by EU-Lisa, the Tallinn-based agency that runs the bloc’s large IT systems. According to the Financial Times, which revealed the case, it was filed at Harju county court, Estonia’s largest district court. No hearing date has been set, and the amount being claimed has not been disclosed.
None of the parties is saying much. EU-Lisa insists the dispute has no bearing on the system, which it says now runs across Europe. The European Commission describes the case as being about delays during development, not about how EES works today. Atos and Leonardo declined to comment and IBM did not reply.
Under EES, every non-EU visitor to the Schengen area, Britons included, gives fingerprints and a facial scan on their first visit. The data replaces passport stamps and is used to track overstayers.
The system was meant to start in 2022. It started in stages in October 2025 and was only required at every border crossing from April this year.
The contract for the core system went in 2019 to a consortium of IBM Belgium, Atos Belgium and Leonardo. In a 2021 answer to the European Parliament, EU-Lisa named IBM as the consortium’s leader. It said the group had built up substantial delays in developing and testing the central system during 2020 and 2021, and that those delays could not be made up.
The relationship then deteriorated. Letters reported by the FT show the firms disputing a fine in 2021 and blaming the pandemic, then rejecting the agency’s revised timetable in 2022 and criticising its governance. The contract value increased from about €142m to about €212m in 2021, which EU procurement records describe as a change for additional services and new requirements. EU-Lisa’s accounts show it later had to find more money for EES, nearly doubling the system’s 2023 budget to €40m. That original contract has since expired and a different consortium now runs the system.
The project has also faced security questions. In 2025 it emerged that Atos had bought software for the system through its Moscow office. EU-Lisa says no breach has been found.
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For UK travel insurers, the queues were the main issue, not the build. In February, ACI Europe and the airlines warned that without flexibility to switch EES off at peak times, waits could exceed four hours. Within days of full rollout in April, around 100 easyJet passengers bound for Manchester were reported to have missed their flight from Milan after border queues of up to three hours. Ryanair later said two- to three-hour waits had built up in Krakow, Lisbon, Milan and Rome over the summer.
Most of those travellers could not claim. The Association of British Insurers has said from the start that losses caused by EES queues are unlikely to be covered. Ratings firm Defaqto went further. It said no UK travel policy explicitly covers EES delays, because border checks are treated as a normal part of the journey and not an insured event. It added that missed-departure sections may still respond in some cases, depending on the wording and circumstances. The government’s guidance tells travellers to allow extra time.
The result is a wide gap between what customers expect and what their policy pays, at a time when the industry is paying out more than £470m a year in travel claims and is also dealing with a sharp rise in detected fraud.
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When large public or private IT projects fail, the argument usually centres on liquidated damages, liability caps and who caused the delay. Those questions decide how much of the loss ends up with a supplier’s technology errors and omissions insurers.
The UK market has a well-known example involving the same company. Co-op Insurance, now Soteria, sued IBM after the 2017 collapse of Project Cobalt, a new underwriting platform. The High Court awarded the insurer about £13m. The Court of Appeal then increased the award to roughly £80m. It ruled that a common clause excluding loss of profit, revenue and savings did not prevent the insurer from recovering money it had wasted on the project. Technology lawyers have been redrafting their exclusion clauses since.
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The Estonian case involves a different legal system and a different contract, so the Cobalt ruling will not decide it. The core questions are the same, though: how much of the delay was the contractor’s fault, how much was down to the client’s own management, and what the contract lets the client recover. The consortium’s complaints about EU-Lisa’s governance suggest it will argue that the agency shares the blame.
