2023-06-20 05:10:57
According to a letter from the Office for Combating Fraud in the Ministry of Finance, the gaming group Novomatic should not have made any donations to the ÖVP in the period 2017/2018. This emerges from an e-mail from May 2023 available to the APA, with which the office answered a request from the economic and corruption prosecutor’s office – there was “no evidence” for such an assumption.
“According to the current status of the procedure”, the audit team of the FAG (tax office for large companies, note) reported that “due to the ongoing company audits, there are no specific indications of (hidden or open) donations/financial contributions from the NOVOMATIC Group, persons attributable to it and in particular by Mag. NEUMANN into the sphere of the ÖVP,” says the letter to the WKStA. The public prosecutor asked their questions in particular with regard to the period from the second half of 2017 to the beginning of 2018.
The background to this is an investigation (on suspicion of corruption and bribery) against ex-Finance Minister Gernot Blümel (ÖVP): The trigger for this was a text message from ex-Novomatic boss Harald Neumann to Blümel in July 2017. In it, Neumann asked him for one Appointment with the then Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz to talk about a donation and about “a problem that we have in Italy”.
After the SMS from Neumann to Blümel, Blümel then asked the Secretary General of the Ministry of Finance and later head of the state holding company ÖBAG, Thomas Schmid, to call Neumann back – with the note “Do it for me”. Blümel himself explained in February 2021 that he had only asked an Austrian authority to “call back” an Austrian company and had certainly never expected or demanded any advantages for this. According to the WKStA, the investigations are still ongoing, as it was currently said on APA request.
Another “sighting report” by the WKStA from May 2023, which is also available to the APA, also states that the Novomatic or persons assigned to it (if known) do not appear as donors. At the same time, it is stated there that, due to a lack of documents, it was not possible to check whether, in addition to donations to the ÖVP federal party, further donations were made to other organizations associated with the ÖVP, in particular to the Junge ÖVP.
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