The parliamentary committee of inquiry into allegations of corruption is to begin with prominence. Chancellor Karl Nehammer is expected to be the first person to provide information on Wednesday. on March 2nd. There are also other well-known names on the summons, such as Minister of Justice Alma Zadic (Greens), entrepreneur Siegfried Wolf and, of course, ex-Öbag boss Thomas Schmid. Not just political celebrities: the ÖVP promises that “objectivity and composure” will be brought to this “transparency committee”. Because the subject of the investigation is so broad, one should not be surprised about the “enormous file deliveries”.
Officially, the committee is called: “Committee of inquiry into clarifying allegations of corruption against ÖVP government members”. However, the People’s Party has agreed on a different name, as parliamentary group leader Andreas Hanger explained at a press conference on Monday. “We have internally chosen the title Transparency Committee.
If you want to illuminate a system and then initiate suggestions for improvement, “then you have to illuminate the entire system”. According to Hanger, this applies to all federal enforcement actions and cites subsidy contracts, procurement processes and personnel decisions as examples. “And that must apply to all parties during the investigation period.”
Against this background, he named two subject areas that were “enormously relevant from our point of view”. On the one hand, it was about the FPÖ, “which in a way imposed a penalty on us. Our job now is to score that penalty.” What is meant is the investigation file of Egisto Ott, a former BVT official network, who apparently also supplied information to politicians from all parties. “This cause needs to be clarified,” says Hanger.
And the faction leader also managed to bring the SPÖ into play. With the interrogation protocol of the opinion researcher Sabine Beinschab, who was temporarily arrested in the advertising corruption affair surrounding the ÖVP and ex-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, there is an allegation that election polls had been manipulated by the SPÖ. Wolfgang Jansky was the managing director of the newspaper “heute” at the time, and it was “unrealistic” that the second president of the National Council, Doris Bures (SPÖ), as Jansky’s partner, would have known nothing about this survey manipulation.
However, Hanger has no problem with the First President of the National Council, Wolfgang Sobotka (ÖVP), as the U-Committee Chairman. He did not want to comment on his heavily criticized statements on the parliamentary shutdown in 1933 or the comparison of the current Russian attack with the situation in Austria in 1945. In general, Hanger called for calm and composure and recalled the spiral of escalation around Ukraine. “We in domestic politics should also think carefully about the tonality and choice of words with which we approach this committee of inquiry”.
