Ursula von der Leyen insisted she has nothing to hide after a mobile phone considered key evidence in a contracting scandal at the German defense ministry was wiped clean.
The European Commission president is being investigated by a German parliamentary committee about how lucrative contracts from the defense ministry, which von der Leyen led until August, were awarded to outside consultants without proper oversight and whether a network of personal connections facilitated those deals.
Last week, members of the committee were told that one of von der Leyen’s two previous mobile phones — which lawmakers demanded to examine as part of their probe — had been wiped clean of all data.
Asked by German weekly Spiegel whether she had anything to hide, von der Leyen responded: “No.”
“I’ve turned in both mobile phones that I used as defense minister,” she said in an interview published Friday. “You’ll have to ask what happened to them there. The devices belong to the ministry, so they had to be returned.”
Von der Leyen said she only learned of the data deletion “from the papers,” adding: “I haven’t been in the ministry since July 17th.”
Lawmakers in the investigative committee believe that text messages on the phone could have shed light about von der Leyen’s possible involvement in the scandal.
The Commission president, however, rejected that assumption: “In my opinion, nothing is lost, because text are suitable for fast communication. But documents and strategies are developed and sent differently in federal ministries,” she said.
“The investigative committee has received hundreds of thousands of pages of file material from the ministry and has heard dozens of witnesses in ten months,” she continued. “Let’s wait and see the results of these investigations. It is, of course, the right of the opposition to poke about in all directions and make all kinds of speculations, but in the end it is the result that counts,” she said.
Von der Leyen is scheduled to be questioned by the parliamentary committee on February 13.