A Polish deputy foreign minister has denied allegations according to which ministry documents are being destroyed, saying that all the data have been archived.

According to the Wirtualna Polska (WP) news and entertainment website, after the general election on October 15, in which the ruling socially-conservative party Law and Justice (PiS) lost parliamentary majority, the Foreign Ministry destroyed 400 kilogrammes of hard drives.

“And in October, an external company received a huge amount of confidential documents,” WP wrote. “In a response sent to us after the publication of our article, the ministry wrote about internal regulations regarding the destruction of documents.”

Commenting on the WP report, Pawel Jablonski, a deputy foreign minister, told reporters in the Sejm, lower house of parliament, on Wednesday that all destroyed documents are also being stored in other formats.

“In its response the ministry answered the questions it had been asked,” Jablonski said. “In accordance with the procedures, which have been in force for many years, data storage devices are kept for a set amount of time as the content of documents has also been stored in other forms, for instance, an electronic one.”

According to Jablonski, all the data, including the archived documents, have been regularly reviewed. And in a situation when there are several versions, data storage carriers are sometimes destroyed,” Jablonski said.

Asked if the amount of 400 kilogrammes destroyed after the October election was similar to the amounts destroyed in the previous years, Jablonski said that it did not differ.