The highest sanctions in Europe so far imposed by the Italian DPA

16. March 2017

Ultimately, the Italian police department (in cooperation with Garante – Italian data protection authority) has carried out an investigation, which has revealed a violation of a data protection legislation and specific actions aimed at introducing the legal circulation of money onto the Chinese market.

Four agent companies and one multinational have turned out to split money transfers for remaining sub-threshold under this perspective. Under these circumstances an unlawful massive personal data processing of unaware individuals (payments and senders) has been performed. What is more, some of the records were up to be filed by not existing individuals or even deceased. Other records however, were left blank.

Taking into account all of the gathered facts, which actually indicated that personal data were used in order to unlawfully avoid the money laundering provisions, a wide-ranging Italian data protection authority sanctioning initiative has been launched. As a result, Garante has issued the highest fines ever in Europe.

Given the number of violations of data protection provisions, the Garante has set the whole amount of sanctions up to a total sum of almost 11,000,000 euros (850,000; 1,260,000; 1,590,000 1,430,000 euros for the agent companies and 5,880,000 euros for the multinational company).

It is believed that such a strict data protection authorities sanction will encourage individual data controllers and companies to accelerate their compliance with the upcoming GDPR (May 2018).