It was when the so-called mink commission in Denmark was to sort out the rounds surrounding the decision to kill all the minks in the country that the tangle gained new momentum.
Decisive text messages from Mette Frederiksen (S) and people in her vicinity were deleted and therefore could not be disclosed.
According to the Prime Minister himself, this is due to a default setting on the phone which meant that the text message was automatically deleted after 30 days.
Got advice on that
On Wednesday evening, Mette Frederiksen called a press conference about the missing text messages.
She believes that the mobile setting was added last summer, before the mink decision, following advice from a department head.
- I thought it made sense.
It was for the sake of information security, says Mette Frederiksen.
She hopes that the text message can now be recreated, to both help the Commission and show that neither she nor the government knew in advance that the killings were illegal.
- Will the text message show news about my knowledge that it was illegal?
No, they will not, says Mette Frederiksen.
Violated the Constitution
The Danish mink tangle started last autumn.
The Danish government then decided that all of the country's 15 million minks would be killed, after a mutation in the coronavirus had spread from minks to humans.
Shortly afterwards, it became clear that the decision to kill even healthy minks was contrary to the Danish constitution.
The Minister of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Mogens Jensen (S), was appointed as responsible for the accident and resigned the next day.
During the autumn, the Mining Commission will hold a total of 61 interrogations with, among others, ministry employees, government officials, industry representatives and ministers.
Last on the list, December 9, is Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.