The Athens prosecutor’s office opened an investigation on Tuesday into the leak of an undefined number of emails from Greeks living abroad, which were obtained by New Democracy MEP, Anna-Michelle Asimakopoulou.
On March 1, multiple Greek voters rushed to social media to complain that unsolicited emails from Asimakopoulou had appeared in their inboxes soon after getting an email from the Interior Ministry, alerting them that postal voting for expatriates will apply in the next general election.
According to Ekathimerini, the voters, in addition, accused the conservative MEP of breaching the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), by sending unsolicited election campaign emails to private accounts without their consent.
Greece’s Ministry of the Interior, is set to launch an internal investigation to determine if a candidate for the ruling conservative party in the forthcoming European parliamentary elections breached privacy regulations by sending campaign materials to hundreds of Greeks living abroad via private email accounts.
“We will not allow any shadows in this matter,” Greece’s Minister of Interior, Niki Kerameus said regarding the probe into whether her ministry was involved in providing Asimakopoulou voters’ private email addresses without their consent.
The Interior Ministry released a brief statement denying that it provided the information after the MEP claimed in an interview that she obtained it from the ministry’s election registers.
Asimakopoulou, in response, has denied breaching data protection regulations yet has presented often conflicting explanations for the origin of the addresses used in the bulk emails.
Source: Ekathimerini
