The former OMV boss Gerhard Roiss shares vigorously against “Putin understanders” in this country. Austria and OMV were deliberately steered into dependence on Russia by a group of people.
“These people have put their own financial interests above all morality,” Roiss told the news magazine “profil”. The major dependency on Russian gas, as is currently the case, should not have been there.
“We were also on a promising path. In 2012 we had the largest gas find in the history of OMV in the Black Sea off Romania,” he cites the “Neptun” project as an example. “My assumption was that we would be able to deliver around three billion cubic meters of gas to Austria with Neptun in the future. That would have covered about a third of the annual requirement,” calculates Roiss.
OMV as “pacemaker” for relations with Russia
But according to him, things turned out differently. “OMV should be the basis for deepening mutual economic relations between Austria and Russia. The OMV group should serve as a kind of pacemaker. There was a lot of lobbying,” says Roiss.
The then state holding company ÖIAG (now ÖBAG) was responsible for the state’s 31.5 percent stake in OMV. When asked about the then ÖIAG supervisory board chairman Siegfried Wolf, who had excellent contacts in Russia, Roiss said to “profil”: “Please do not expect me to comment on this gentleman.” The same applies to the Russian head of state Vladimir Putin.
The owner representative for Austria’s interests in the Viennese oil and chemical company is the respective finance minister. Between 2014 and the end of 2017, that was Finance Minister Hans Jörg Schelling (ÖVP), who, according to “profil”, had a consulting contract with the Russian gas company Gazprom after leaving politics.
Roiss: “This is a general problem that has become apparent over the past five or six years – the close interlocking of politics and business. We no longer only have oligarchs from the East, we also have small Austro-oligarchs for a long time now.”