Mysteries of a scandal
What the Interior Ministry said in its announcement regarding the independent investigation into the leak of the emails of dozens of overseas Greeks was true. The Data Protection Authority did indeed determine that the leak was not connected to the postal vote for the upcoming European Parliament elections, as the list of recipients was drawn up on June 8, 2023, and sent to governing New Democracy’s secretary for diaspora affairs a couple of weeks later, on June 23.
However, the watchdog’s 68-page report also included some other interesting findings. One of them concerns the unofficial probe conducted by the government into the affair, which led to the ouster of the Interior Ministry general secretary, Michalis Stavrianoudakis, and ND’s secretary for diaspora affairs, Nick Theodoropoulos. The DPA said that it had sent a letter to the prime minister’s general secretariat requesting its cooperation in the authority’s investigation by providing all the information collected during its own probe, which the government had made public. “The authority did not receive an answer,” the DPA noted.
Of course! When a mere agency of the state (the National Intelligence Service) refuses to answer the questions of its highest offices (Parliament and the judiciary), you can hardly expect the prime minister’s general secretariat to respond to a humble independent authority.
But the most interesting finding of all concerns the fact that Theodoropoulos, the ND official who was ousted, apparently stated that he did not receive the personal data of Greek voters living abroad from the Interior Ministry, but, rather, from a New Democracy official who was responsible for the electoral rolls. He did not name the official, but he did clarify that it was an official of the party’s intersecretarial coordinating body, while reserving the right to only name the official in a briefing note.
What happened next, according to the DPA report, is the stuff of a good political drama. Theodoropoulos apparently presented the message “through which he received the Excel file containing the names and emails of the Greeks abroad from a phone with a Greek number, but the last five digits of the number were partially concealed.” According to the DPA’s report, “Mr Theodoropoulos claims that the second-to-last number, which is visible, does not correspond, in his knowledge, to any associates of the former Interior Ministry general secretary to whom the electoral rolls were distributed by the Election Directorate, as per the Interior Ministry’s press release dated 26/4/2024.”
What kind of nonsense is this? Are they really playing games with such an important case? Are we to imagine that the justice system (with its fabled independence) will find the mysterious Mr or Mrs X that Theodoropoulos turned into an enigma?
