Salla / Digital Omnibus Conflict of Interest
Standard: European Parliament Code of Conduct; EU institutional integrity standards
From May 2020 to April 2023, Aura Salla served as Public Policy Director and Head of EU Affairs at Meta, leading the company's entire Brussels lobbying team and extensively lobbying the European Parliament on EU privacy rules — including the GDPR framework she was paid to weaken.
In 2024 she was elected as a Kokoomus MEP and appointed rapporteur for the Digital Omnibus — the legislation that revises and simplifies the same GDPR enforcement architecture she spent three years lobbying against.
She failed to declare her Meta role as a potential conflict of interest in her declaration of awareness, as required by the Parliament's Code of Conduct. Seven civil society organisations issued a formal open letter calling for her appointment to be withdrawn.
In April 2025 she sold undeclared stocks in a defence company following press reporting — stocks she had not declared in her declaration of private interests, held while participating in discussions about major increases in defence subsidies to that sector.
Her public statements on digital sovereignty — European cloud first, stop American market dominance — are structurally incompatible with the deregulation agenda of the Digital Omnibus she is leading. The package weakens the enforcement mechanisms that sovereignty requires while deploying sovereignty rhetoric to justify simplification.
The ownership-and-control criterion — which would exclude AWS European Sovereign Cloud and Meta's own EU subsidiary from qualifying as European — does not appear anywhere in the Digital Omnibus framework.
The charge: Europe's digital sovereignty rapporteur is her former employer's most useful asset in Brussels.
Evidence
- Seven civil society organisations' open letter, 2024
- Salla declaration of awareness, European Parliament record
- Salla defence stock disclosure, April 2025, press reporting
- Digital Omnibus draft text, 2025-2026
- Salla Bluesky post May 2026: "Let's finally say out loud that we want to prevent American company market dominance"
- Probe question posted publicly: "How do you prevent 'European-ness' being defined so loosely that AWS EU-region or Meta's European subsidiary qualifies? The criterion must be ownership and control, not country of registration." — JP Ahonen, May 2026. No response received.
All audit entries are living documents. Updates are published with date stamps. Verdicts may be revised as evidence develops. Predictions are resolved — confirmed, denied, or extended — at the stated resolution date.