A German politician has filed a criminal complaint over the erasure of data from a mobile phone owned by Ursula von der Leyen, the new European Commission president, when she was Germany’s defense minister.
Tobias Lindner, a member of the Bundestag from the opposition Green party, filed the complaint against unnamed individuals over suspected deliberate destruction of evidence, German media reported on Saturday.
The complaint comes as members of a German parliamentary committee are investigating how lucrative contracts from the country’s defense ministry were awarded to outside consultants without proper oversight, and whether a network of informal personal connections had facilitated those deals.
German lawmakers wanted to examine von der Leyen’s phone, but an official from the country’s defense ministry said on Thursday that the device, which investigators had demanded be handed over since February, had been deleted in August.
In Lindner’s two-page complaint to German judicial authorities, the lawmaker argues that the deletion of data had “thwarted the gathering of evidence of the [parliamentary committee] in the context of the investigation it is carrying out for the Bundestag and has therefore seriously damaged the aim of a parliamentary clarification of the so-called consultant affair,” magazine Der Spiegel reported.
The ministry said the phone had been deleted because of security incident, a government spokesperson told the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
A spokesperson for the European Commission was not immediately available for comment.