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Italy’s Meloni Says Civil Servants Were Disloyal in Hacking Case

(Bloomberg) -- Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni addressed a national scandal over the illegal sale of confidential personal data, saying some civil servants acted disloyally in a case that saw data on political and business leaders hacked from national security databases.

Civil servants entrusted with protecting sensitive information on the databases “used their powers to do other things with the data,” Meloni said Wednesday on state Rai television, likening the people involved to burglars who steal valuables and sell them on.

Italian police have made a series of arrests linked to private investigators who offered clients information stolen from the databases, and a number of high-profile Italian citizens have allegedly been targeted. 

“We keep seeing cases of all sorts,” Meloni said, discussing the revelations. “There was a case of a financier working in the anti-mafia department logging on tens of thousands of times while collecting information on center-right politicians,” she said.

“There was case of a bank employee who accessed accounts,” including some held by Meloni and her family, the premier said. 

Meloni, 47, has regularly said she’s the target of undercover smear campaigns, but has generally not provided evidence to support her claims.

Speaking of civil servants who may be involved in the case, the premier said that it’s “unacceptable their superiors would not realize sensitive data was accessed illegitimately, hundreds of thousands of times.”

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