Bank employee sentenced for privacy breach

In an appeal hearing on Tuesday, Bratislava Regional Court upheld the conviction of Filip Rybanič, Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) MP Jozef Rajtár's assistant, who as a bank employee violated banking secrecy laws by going public with information from the account of former interior minister Robert Kaliňák. The court gave Rybanič a three-year suspended sentence with one year of probation, having found him guilty of providing information about bank accounts to an unauthorised person, namely a former Trend weekly journalist. The ruling is final and there can be no further appeal against it. Back in September Bratislava V District Court also ordered Rybanič to issue a public apology to Kaliňák, but this was not upheld by the appeal court. Meanwhile, Freedom and Solidarity spokesman Róbert Buček repeated on Tuesday that the party views Rybanič as a whistleblower and his actions as serving the public interest.