Senior figures in Holyrood including Humza Yousaf and Nicola Sturgeon are at the centre of a growing secrecy row after it was alleged WhatsApp messages discussing the response to the pandemic were wiped from phones.
The UK Government has already shared thousands of text messages and emails with the inquiry which expose the tensions at the heart of the response to the public health emergency in 2020."We went through a battle with Boris Johnson and the Cabinet Office, they lost that battle with the UK Inquiry, and the information was provided that exposed a culture of impunity, a culture of denial, and total chaos at the heart of No 10.
"If there was a position of auto-delete, if there was a situation where ministers and senior civil servants were deleting their materials, it should have been ordered to be stopped," he added. Documents given to the UK Covid Inquiry show the former first minister is among a string of senior government figures who claim the data no longer exists.
Anwar continued: "We wanted to know what lay at the heart of the decision making. It's not the official record we're interested in, we want to know what were the discussions. "The SNP’s culture of secrecy and unaccountability has been utterly corrosive and it is wholly unacceptable that the public inquiry should be obstructed by the Scottish Government’s failure to provide answers.