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Information technology workers in the Privy Council Office appear to have deleted an email account from a key player in the Mike Duffy Senate affair days after being ordered to save every email and file from the prime minister’s departing staff.

Internal PCO emails, along with IT service tickets, show that two orders to retain digital files were sent in mid- and late-March 2013. The latter order was sent just days before Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s one-time legal adviser, Benjamin Perrin, left his office.

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Perrin left the PMO in late March 2013. A March 28, 2013, IT service ticket about Perrin’s email and network accounts said “accounts have been deleted” — even though the PCO said no such deletion occurred.

About eight months later, PCO found the emails — which it thought were lost — and handed over a cache of Perrin’s messages to the RCMP as part of the force’s fraud and breach of trust case against suspended Senator Mike Duffy.