The economic and corruption prosecutor’s office wants to open the electronic data of dozens of employees of the Federal Chancellery in the ÖVP advertisement scandal.
This emerges from an order available to the APA. All employees in the area of information activities of the federal government (in particular information initiatives, media planning – and budget) in the cabinet who were responsible for the two areas mentioned are also affected, together with any assigned team assistants and office staff. In total, an estimated 100 people were involved in the searches.
The public prosecutor’s office argues that former close associates of ex-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) have deleted masses of emails and exchanged their cell phones and now evidence may be missing. It would already be apparent that “the accused communicated by e-mail or chat messages in the course of implementing their crime plan”. The necessary evidence gathering is not possible in any other way, “because the accused have made large-scale deletions of their electronic data,” says the reasoning.
emails deleted
In the secured email inbox of a Kurz speaker, almost all emails from January 10, 2020 to August 3, 2021 are said to have been deleted. “For this period, there are only 242 ‘unique’ e-mails – therefore after deduplication – in the mailbox, almost all of which come from the Outlook folder ‘Calendar’ and ‘Inbox/Flights’. E-mails from August 5th 2021 were also deleted almost continuously, whereby the deletions could be traced as part of the IT forensic processing. The first email that was not deleted was from October 5, 2021 at 5:28 p.m., so immediately before the search on the following day,” says the WKStA.
By securing thousands of additional data, the WKStA hopes to be able to gain “information about the award of contracts and the use of the results of the surveys in public relations” in a roundabout way. “A restriction to specific people is not possible due to a lack of knowledge of the specific structures and responsibilities as well as operational processes within the extensive staff.”
Kurz lawyer: “Because you haven’t found anything, you have to keep digging”
Kurz’s lawyer, Werner Suppan, sees this step as a further sign that “the WKStA’s investigations have so far not revealed anything reprehensible.” “Because you haven’t found anything, you have to keep digging. But the WKStA won’t find anything here either, because nobody was guilty of anything.”
The advertisement affair is about the suspicion that members of the ÖVP around Sebastian Kurz, then Foreign Minister, are said to have illegally used budget funds from the Ministry of Finance, starting in 2016, to have fake opinion polls created and placed them in the daily newspaper “Österreich”. The aim should have been to influence public opinion and that of the ÖVP within the party in order to enable Sebastian Kurz to rise to the position of ÖVP chairman and Austrian Federal Chancellor.
Source: Nachrichten
