Photo illustration. Photo Credits: Caspar Camille Rubin /Unspleash

The Tirana prosecution instructed BIRN that it has “started verifications” of a list allegedly containing the private knowledge of tons of of hundreds of Albanian electorate which has been circulated on social media.

It is alleged that the knowledge comprises the monthly salaries, job positions, employer names and ID numbers of some 630,000 electorate, from both the non-public and non-private sectors.

It is suspected that the list was leaked from the tax carrier or the Social Insurance Institute.

Executive spokesman Endri Fuga said that the Ministry of Finance was following with grief the free up of recordsdata on the salaries of Albanian electorate, and described the story as “unlawful”.


Fuga said in an announcement that preliminary prognosis has proven that “there has been no digital export of the [state] payroll database” and that the story is a “merger of several diversified items” of recordsdata.

President Ilir Meta called it “a flagrant violation of freedoms, human rights and dignity, laws and the constitution” and entreated the authorities to examine the case and receive the perpetrators.

“The non-public knowledge of every citizen, which is stored by public institutions and administered in instruct databases, is private, suited by law and supposed to be veteran honest appropriate for the coolest thing about electorate and the instruct most tremendous,” Meta said.

“Any other express of it’s a prison act, which endangers the social bellow by violating the non-public security of every citizen,” he added.

The deputy chief of the opposition Democratic Occasion, Enkelejd Alibeaj, said it was “an unparalleled scandal” and alleged that the authorities of Top Minister Edi Rama has failed to offer protection to “private and sensitive knowledge on salaries, private identification numbers, and the places of work of over 630,000 electorate”.

Alibeaj said the Democratic Occasion believes that the rep newsletter of the list “is phase of a [ruling] celebration-instruct technique to express sensitive recordsdata for electoral functions”.

If confirmed, this is in a position to be the 2nd time in a year that desirable portions of electorate’ private knowledge have entered the final public enviornment.

In April 2021, a few days earlier than the accepted elections within the country, a database with the non-public recordsdata of round 910,000 voters in Tirana was leaked to the media.

It was claimed that the database belonged to the ruling Socialist Occasion and was taken from instruct institutions and veteran for electoral functions.

The database, which BIRN has seen, contained some 910,000 entries alongside side names, addresses, initiating dates, private ID playing cards, employment recordsdata and other knowledge.

The Socialist Occasion denied wrongdoing, insisting that the knowledge was gathered in door-in-door surveys.