Four Suspects Arrested for Publishing Salaries in Albania

Eni Kyriaco and Andy Agaraj, IT specialists at the General Tax Directorate, Klodian Sota, private Master, and Andrew Ikonomi, director of the company “Credit 2 All”, are the names of arrested persons suspected of having published the wages and sensitive personal data of nearly 630,000 citizens in Albania.

Police in Albania have executed the Tirana Prosecutor's Order by arresting four people for the public wage leak scandal and sensitive personal data of approximately 630,000 Albanian citizens, in December of the year we just left behind.

Eni Kyriaco and Andy Agaraj, IT specialists at the General Tax Directorate, Klodian Sota, private director, employed by private company “SMART Collection”, and Andrew Ikonomi, director of the company “Credit 2 All”, the company that offers the construction of electronic products for credit financial institutions, are the names of arrested persons. Their arrest was disclosed by Tirana Prosecutor's Speaker Elizabeth Imeraj, and the heads of state police during a media conference Friday.

The Tirana prosecution has cleared the mechanism through which the tax server released the salary records of over 630 thousand citizens, as well as four people suspected of being responsible for their distribution. Imeraj said wage dates have become the object of sale-purchasing by persons working in the private sector, but she added that investigations are continuing to reveal the purpose of their use.

“We have managed to conclude in reasonable doubt and as a result of the preliminary investigation we have identified four authors”, Imeraj said. “IT WAS, having access to personal data in the salaries of several months, that he entered into the data and distributed this data to his colleague Andy Agaraj, who used this data and sold it to private subjects. So it's not about computer networking intervention, but certain employees have abused the task by their actions, and the data provided has been sold to private subjects”, chief prosecutor Imeraj said.

It found that the other two persons arrested work in the area of completion, adding that “these data used for their own work purposes, or for other purposes”.

The procedure is investigating, not only the mechanism of the event, the identity of authors who had access and sold these data to other people, but also the purpose of using these data”, she said. Imeraj also disclosed that the investigation into the Transport Directorate follows, as another scandal accompanied the extraction of data for wages, with the flow of personal vehicle license plates data.

One of the police arrested for the salary publication scandal -- exactly Andrew Ikonomi -- turns out to have worked recently for the company of a Russian billionaire in Albania, called Credit 2 All (Digital International KPS), which according to QB data, specializes in financial consulting and electronic products in this field.

The 57-year-old Russian businessman, Oleg Viktorovich Boyko, reportedly has a $1.3 billion fortune, according to the magazine “Forbes”, and is described on his website as one of the 100 richest Russian businessmen, the 30-year international investor in the banking industry and digital financial services and director of the Finstar Financial Group. However, an intelligence report by the US Senate cites the Russian oligarch, Oleg Boyko, as a person who is “concerned with Russian government, Russian intelligence and security services and with links to organised crime”.

The Moldovan press has reported that Boyko was involved in an operation supported by the Kremlin for the external influence of elections there”, written in the US report, where several paragraphs are censored.

An investigation into the platform of Romanian anti-corruption journalists “Black Sea” cited Oleg Boyko as Fashion TV's investor who, together with a partner in Latvia, used Malta as a fiscal paradise to operate in Europe and the US, while winning huge sums for emergency loans to Europe without paying taxes.

From QB data (national Business Centre), Russian national Oleg Viktorovich Boyko has acquired 100% of the company's shares on May 8th 2018 from the previous owner: Pressa Holding Limited, a company operating in Cyprus's fiscal paradise, a day after its administrator is named, the currently arrested police officer, Andrew Ikonomi, who has worked until 17 September 2021.

Vlado Cvetkosvki results in company manager from October 2021. Oleg Viktorovich Boyko describes Finstar's mission as the foreground in “the use of deep technology and data science to ensure global financial inclusion”.

At the end of last year, a database of the personal and sensitive data of 637,183 citizens was distributed in series through the “Whapp” app, marking the largest flow of official data in Albania. The database contains personal numbers, names, working subjects, as well as the monthly salary of all persons registered as employed in the public and private sector in Albania. The discovery of these personal data and salaries of hundreds of thousands of Albanians rocked this country in December and raised concerns about the worst privacy threat on this scale in Albania.