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Grasser’s trial comes to an end: LIVE from the verdict.
© APA / ROLAND SCHLAGER
In the corruption trial against former finance minister Karl-Heinz Grasser and 13 other defendants, a verdict will be delivered today after a three-year main hearing. We report on the verdict on the LIVE blog.
Judge Marion Hohenecker will announce the verdict as senate chair of the jury, which will likely take several hours due to the long scope of the trial.
A total of 14 defendants and three indictments will deal with the jury panel’s verdict. Due to the large number of visitors, the Vienna Criminal Court has issued reservation cards to representatives of the media. For some time now, the great jury room has been outfitted with Plexiglas partition windows and sanitizer dispensers to meet corona requirements.
Karl-Heinz Grasser faces up to ten years in prison
The first defendant Grasser faces up to ten years in prison. The indictment of the Economic and Corruption Prosecutor’s Office accuses the Finance Minister of two governments of former Foreign Minister Wolfgang Schüssel of having committed embezzlement in the privatization of federal apartments in 2004 and of allowing himself to be bribed. Furthermore, he is said to have received a bribe when the tax authorities rented the Terminal Tower office building in Linz. The privatization of Buwog entails a commission of 9.6 million euros, while the Linz office building is said to have flowed 200,000 euros. According to the indictment, the money was shared between Grasser and his accomplices.
Grasser and co-defendants Walter Meischberger and Ernst Plech, who have been unable to stand trial for health reasons for a long time, reject the accusations and accuse the accusers of bias and violation of the law. Witnesses accuse them of lying. Former co-defendant lobbyist Peter Hochegger made a partial confession at the beginning of the trial and thus incriminated the other defendants.
Grasser’s trial lasted almost three years
In the process, which lasted almost exactly three years, the question of whether Grasser’s secret information on Meischberger and Hochegger reached the ultimately victorious bidders Immofinanz and RLB Upper Austria during the federal housing privatization was examined in detail. Grasser and Meischberger firmly deny it. Using advice from Hochegger and Meischberger, Immofinanz / RLB Upper Austria outbid CA Immo by nearly one million and won the tender for the federal apartments with EUR 961 million. Meischberger stated that he had received the crucial information from the former head of the FPÖ and governor of Carinthia, now deceased, Jörg Haider.
In addition, charges related to the financing of the telecommunications part, as well as an accusation of fraud related to the Meischberger village, were included in the process. This will also be judged on Friday. The process began on December 12, 2017 and lasted 168 days. Due to the crown, he took a longer break in the running this spring.
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