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KTM boss Stefan Pierer was an invited witness at the Ibiza investigation committee on Wednesday. The industrialist, who by his own definition is “one of the best-known Austrian businessmen”, was the second largest donor to Vice President Sebastian Kurz’s campaign in the 2017 National Council election campaign with exactly 436,563 euros.
After ten years of the grand coalition, he was “very frustrated” and motivated by the young Foreign Minister Kurz’s program to provide “advice and action.” After meeting in Mattighofen, Linz and Vienna, he offered Kurz to double the fundraising from his crowdfunding platform. He had “maybe a hundred (100,000 euros, note)” but didn’t expect it to be such a high sum, Pierer said.
Pierer rejected the opposition’s suspicion that there had been a legal consideration for this, such as the 12-hour rule. That should be “discarded entirely”. With a “KTM export share of 95 percent” only, its focus is on the world market and less on Austria. Pierer also rejected the fact that he had learned tax breaks for his gift drawn from private assets through the intervention of vice-presidential circles.
Rene Benko in Parliament
Photo: APA / HELMUT FOHRINGER
In front of the KTM boss, Rene Benko spoke. The Tyrolean real estate mogul was one of the former FP boss Heinz-Christian Strache named as a donor in the Ibiza video (“Benko pays ÖVP and us”). How Strache arrived at this statement is completely inexplicable to him. Neither he personally nor his Signa group “have ever donated to political parties or party-affiliated associations,” Benko said.
Over the course of his four-hour poll, which, as with Pierer, was marked by numerous debates about the rules of procedure between the vice-president parliamentary group and the opposition, he also touched on Benko’s main real estate projects in Austria. For example, the purchase of Möbel-Leiner-Haus in Mariahilfer Straße in 2019 or of Postsparkasse in the center of Vienna in 2013. The value of the latter suddenly increased by almost 200 million euros in 2019 due to the conclusion of a “lease unusually long term “with the Federal Real Estate Company (227 Percentage) increased, calculated Nina Tomaselli (Greens). Benko rejected the fact that there was a political intervention behind this.
He admitted that he had known Kurz since “what seemed like an eternity”, but they were not friends. Strache was once on his 62 meter boat “Roma”. Had I invited him? “He doesn’t remember such insignificant details,” Benko said.
Article of
Lucian mayringer
Startup Policy Editor
