Image: HELMUT FOHRINGER (APA)
Accompanied by his lawyer Oliver Scherbaum, he attended a trial at the Vienna Regional Court on Monday about an attempted provision on false testimony in the parliamentary Ibiza investigative committee. Hessenthaler I received the ankle bracelet “a few weeks ago” and am working in Vienna, said Scherbaum when asked by APA.
Hessenthaler, who is said to have produced the “Ibiza” video, which showed the then FPÖ boss and Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache and the then FPÖ club chairman Johann Gudenus in a villa on Ibiza in conversation with an alleged oligarch’s niece, was in March In 2022 he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for cocaine trafficking and forgery. This judgment is final, all appeals brought against it and applications for release from liability were rejected by the judiciary.
As Scherbaum explained to the APA, it would have Hessenthaler, who was arrested in Berlin in December 2020, extradited to Austria and taken into custody, had served two-thirds of his sentence at the beginning of April and was therefore due for conditional release. The domestic legal system provides for crediting pre-trial detention against court-imposed prison sentences. In Austria, the judicial proceedings for the narcotics offense are thus settled. However, Scherbaum emphasized that a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) was being prepared.
Hessenthaler himself did not want to comment for the time being. His legal representative concluded that he took part in the hearing “out of interest”.
Source: Nachrichten
