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Two billionaires are invited to the U-Committee today: the founder of Signa Holding, René Benko. He came to this “honor” because the former vice chancellor and head of the FPÖ, Heinz-Christian Strache, named him in the video as an alleged donor to the ÖVP and the FPÖ. Strache said in the video: “Benko pays us.”
The second billionaire is KTM boss Stefan Pierer. During the 2017 election campaign, he doubled the small donations (crowdfunding) for Sebastian Kurz. After all, that was more than 400,000 euros. “I wanted to support Sebastian Kurz.” At that time he approached Sebastian Kurz because “he was convinced of his program.” The SPÖ then tried to “discredit” him. After all, the things of his tax law were made public in parliamentary questions. “You can imagine what that means,” Pierer said. “That’s it. I’m ready to answer any questions now.”
First things first: as with other surveys, the questionnaires with investor René Benko turned out to be very “difficult”. The leader of the SPÖ parliamentary group, Jan Krainer, described the marathon of questions as follows: “The poll reminded me of Blümel, who also remembered nothing.”
Strache reported a “dubious video”
At first, however, it was a thank you. “Not all billionaires like to accept our invitations, so I thank you,” said SPÖ MP Christoph Matznetter. Right at the beginning of the poll, the billionaire stated that it was “completely inexplicable” to him “how Strache could say that.” Strache called him a few days before the Ibiza video was posted and “apologized to Benko.” In this phone call, Strache informed the real estate mogul of a “dubious video.” “But Strache was talking around the bush. Strache was always talking a lot. I wasn’t sure what it was about. Only when I saw the video did I know what he meant by that,” Benko told the U-Committee.
Benko also stated that neither he nor the Signa group had personally donated to a party, and they never asked for donations. .
The leader of the FPÖ parliamentary group, Christian Hafenecker, got to the bottom of the relationship between Benko and Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. “It feels like forever,” he meets Sebastian Kurz, Benko said. He doesn’t know if Kurz was already secretary of state when he met him. The FPÖ mandate then wanted to know how he would describe the relationship with Kurz. “We appreciate each other, but we don’t know each other well enough to go on vacation together,” Benko said.
Is vacations always a private matter?
Then Hafenecker asked and wanted to know which politicians Benko was on vacation with (Strache was visiting Benko’s yacht). Benko did not want to answer the question because he sees it as an invasion of his privacy. A discussion developed between the deputies, the trial judge and Benko’s confidant. The trial judge also said that, in principle, the issue of the license is not prohibited.
