alt Hacker News> Deloitte Cyprus said it could not comment on the specific allegations because the documents were more than 20 years old and no longer accessible.
That's convenient.
Also, I received a similar response when inquiring about a financial account that had been overlooked (there are reasons, I'm not getting into it) for a couple of decades. "Can't help you. Too old for us to have records." Well, my records are printed documents. Why can't you tell me anything? Reminds me of when the USA government stole my money from a bank transfer claiming suspicion of whatever (my landlord had a Middle Eastern sounding name and it was the 2000s) and then said they had no record of it when I provided all the required documentation to recover it.
In both cases, unfortunately, I concluded that the odds are so stacked against me that I gave up. Convenient system if you're fabulously wealthy or a massive org (such as corporations and government).
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2013 is not 20 years old so those documents should be readily available.
Most institutions (especially financial) have strict document retention policies to protect themselves from situations like this. It's not shady – just a way of limiting liability.
At my first job I made the mistake of discovering a cache of old documents, documents that were far older than the company's seven-year document retention policy. The cache, being my discovery, meant I became the one responsible for destroying it. It was dozens on dozes of bankers boxes filled with documents that I had to de-spine before shredding.
You would have thought that the process was a chore but for me it was exhilarating. The slowness of the process gave me the opportunity to speed read through it all. There was nothing scandalous in there, but I became somewhat of a historian over many quiet nights.