Germany's defence ministry told parliament it spent 2.9 million euros on consultants in 2016. The real number was 150 million. When investigators demanded the minister's texts as evidence, the phone was wiped. By then she had the top job in Europe: Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission. The trick was an accounting label. Consultant contracts were booked as "support services," not consulting, so the budget committee never saw it. For 2015 the ministry reported 2.2 million while roughly 100 million flowed to consultants across 182 contracts. Germany's audit office blew it open in autumn 2018: day rates ran up to 1,700 euros, and of 56 sampled contracts, 44 were awarded without real competition. Von der Leyen had brought McKinsey's Katrin Suder in as state secretary; Accenture's Bundeswehr business grew from 459,000 euros in 2014 to about 20 million in 2018. Then the phone. A parliamentary inquiry had demanded her texts as evidence since February 2019. Green MP Tobias Lindner says the ministry first claimed the phone could not be found, then that only she knew its PIN. In December 2019 it admitted the phone was wiped in August, weeks after her election as Commission President. The official reason: a routine security wipe, because a hacker had leaked her number online. That leak was eight months old, and she'd used a replacement since January. Her second phone held no messages either. Lindner filed a criminal complaint for destruction of evidence. In February 2020 she testified: rules had been broken, but not by her, and she had nothing to hide. The final report, written by the majority of her own governing coalition, found nothing to blame her for. The opposition called the affair a political total failure. Nobody knows what was in those texts, the wipe rule for compromised phones is real policy, and the complaint was filed against unknown persons, not her. What is documented is the timing: the texts were demanded in February, she left for Brussels in July, and the phone was erased in August. No one was charged, nothing was recovered, and she has run the European Commission ever since. #ursulavonderleyen #eu #germany #politics #fyp - @kapitolai_