Former counterintelligence officer Egisto Ott was detained in Austria on suspicion of espionage. According to the public prosecutor’s office in Vienna, he is being investigated for abuse of authority and espionage against Austria, APA reported today.
The detention is related to the espionage scandal surrounding a former member of the management of the bankrupt Wirecard company, Jan Marsalok, who fled to Russia in 2020 and, according to available findings, cooperated with the Russian secret service.
According to the newspaper Der Standard, the Russian secret services obtained the phones of three former high-ranking officials of the Austrian Ministry of the Interior. This was supposed to happen in the summer of 2022, and the handover was to be arranged by the former official of the now defunct Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Fight against Terrorism (BVT), Egisto Ott.
Information about the transfer of data from smart phones was supposed to be passed on to the Austrian side by the British authorities. It is there that the investigation of Jan Marsalok is being conducted. According to the findings of British investigators, he was supposed to lead a group of Bulgarian agents who, among other things, spied for Russia in Britain.
According to the Standard, the stolen smartphones belonged to Michael Kloibmüller, long-time chief of staff at the Ministry of the Interior, Michael Takacs, now director of the federal police, and Gernot Maier, director of the Federal Office for Immigration and Asylum.
Three mobile phones ended up in the wrong hands after an accident in 2017. A canoe overturned and smartphones fell into the water on a Home Office trip. An IT technician from counterintelligence was then asked to fix it. According to the Standard, he apparently made copies of the devices and gave the cell phones to Otto and others. That man, whose name has not been released, is also being investigated.
Ott has been under investigation for about seven years and is accused of a number of crimes. The State Prosecutor’s Office suspects him of abusing his access to data and its sale. The customer was the former head of the counterintelligence department, Martin Weiss, who was paid by Jan Marsalek. But Ott always denied spying for Russia.
A month-long investigation by Austrian and German media recently revealed that Marsalek was believed to have been in contact with Russian intelligence officers for a decade. Marsalek is believed to have worked with Russia as early as when he was CEO of German financial services provider Wirecard. After the spectacular collapse of this group, the native of Vienna fled to Russia, where he now lives under a new identity and apparently continues to work for the Russian services.
Tags: Austria detained member counterintelligence spying Russia
