The European Union has dragged IBM, Atos, and Leonardo into court over years of delays to its troubled €212 million smart border system, which finally went live after missing a string of deadlines and leaving travelers stuck in airport queues. The lawsuit dates back to December 22, 2025, when eu-LISA, the agency behind the EU’s fingerprint-and-facial-image border checks for non-EU travelers, filed its claim in an Estonian court. The lawsuit was buried in eu-LISA’s 2025 financial accounts , published in July, with no mention of who was being sued. The Financial Times has since named the three companies after obtaining letters exchanged with the agency. In a statement to The Register , eu-LISA confirmed it had initiated proceedings "in line with the Agency’s responsibility to protect the EU’s financial interests." "The proceedings concern the system’s development phase and have no impact on its current operation. EES (entry exit system) is fully operational," the agency said, declining to discuss the ongoing case. The EES was supposed to be ready in 2022 yet wasn’t live until October 2025 and was only fully operational from April. Travelers have since had to contend with hours-long airport queues and fingerprint scanners that reportedly struggle with sweaty fingers. Behind the scenes, things weren’t going much better, with the consortium and eu-LISA spending years arguing over missed deadlines, financial penalties and who was to blame. IBM Belgium and Atos Belgium were already arguing over penalties back in October 2021, when they disputed a fine from eu-LISA and pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors beyond their control as reasons for the delays. By February 2022, the consortium was pushing back against another set of deadlines, warning that the agency’s timetable was unrealistic…