Austria’s former Vice Chancellor and former leader of the far-right Freedom Party (FPO), Heinz-Christian Strache, was again acquitted Tuesday of a 15-month suspended sentence for a corruption offense.
The case for which he has been acquitted revolves around donations valued at about 12,000 euros that his party would have received between 2016 and 2017 by the manager of a private hospital in Vienna as consideration for his maneuvers to change the law and favor the private business of this person, a friend of his.
In August last year that same sentence was annulled and the trial had to be repeated when the court considered that a series of messages that would exonerate Strache, who a month earlier was acquitted of another corruption offense about suspicious donations to a group close to his formation, were not sufficiently valued.
On this occasion, the judge has argued that there is not enough evidence to prove that Strache was aware that the FPO had received such a donation before the party bet on health reform. In addition to the right-wing extremist, the owner of the clinic was also acquitted.
This is not the first case of alleged corruption in which Strache has been acquitted, as in July last year he was also acquitted of the accusation of having offered a businessman a seat on the supervisory board of the state highway operator, Asfinag, in exchange for donations to the FPO.
This matter has been under the focus of a commission of inquiry in the Austrian Parliament dealing with the so-called ‘Ibizagate’, a corruption scandal detected when the FPO was part of the coalition government of the former chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, also splashed by other corruption cases that ended up decanting his political fall in 2021.
In ‘Ibizagate’ was unleashed in May 2019 with the publication of a video in which Strache and the one who was his ‘number two’ in the FPO, Johann Gudenus, can be seen being tempted by a woman posing as the niece of a Russian oligarch who offered them positive media coverage in exchange for public contracts.
The scandal forced Kurz to dismiss the Minister of the Interior, Herbert Kickl, of the FPO, which caused the rest of the members of the cabinet of that formation to resign, which led to the dissolution of the government and the calling of new elections.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
