Former New Democracy MEP Anna Michelle Asimakopoulou was among those convicted after email addresses from Greeks abroad were used for pre-election campaign messages

An Athens misdemeanour court has handed suspended prison sentences to four people over the unauthorised use of email addresses belonging to Greeks abroad before the June 2024 European Parliament elections.

The highest sentence was imposed on Anna Michelle Asimakopoulou, a former Member of the European Parliament for New Democracy, Greece’s governing conservative party. She received 20 months in prison, suspended for three years, over her role in a case that became one of the most politically sensitive data-protection scandals of the 2024 election period.

At the centre of the case was a list of email addresses connected to Greeks living overseas who had registered for postal voting. Those contact details later reached Asimakopoulou’s political office and were used to send campaign messages shortly before the European vote.

Michalis Stavrianoudakis, a former secretary general at Greece’s Interior Ministry, was sentenced to 18 months, also suspended. Nikos Theodoropoulos, New Democracy’s former secretary for diaspora affairs, received an eight-month sentence, while Menios Koromilas, a former senior party organiser, received 12 months. The court also applied three-year suspensions to their sentences.

The convictions concerned breaches of personal data rules and, for some defendants, breach of official confidentiality. The court accepted previous lawful conduct as a mitigating factor.

The affair began when Greek voters abroad reported receiving political emails from Asimakopoulou despite not having shared their contact details with her campaign. The complaints triggered scrutiny over how voter information held by state authorities was handled, who had access to it, and whether it had been used for party-political purposes.

Greece’s Data Protection Authority had already issued administrative penalties in the case, including a €400,000 fine for the Interior Ministry, €40,000 for Asimakopoulou, and €10,000 each for Theodoropoulos and Koromilas. A separate fine against New Democracy was later cancelled by the Council of State, Greece’s highest administrative court.