posted 09-02-122 16:32 ET (US)        

Austria was hit by a political corruption scandal. Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is suspected of bribing sociologists and journalists who helped him come to power.

The day before, the Austrian prosecutor's office came to search the politician's headquarters in Vienna. Prosecutors claim that Kurz and his entourage bribed the editorial board of an Austrian tabloid as well as sociologists for public money so that they would cover his political activities in a favorable light.

Austrian chancellor suspected of corruption
According to prosecutors, in 2016 - 2018, when the current chancellor was just a member of the "Austrian People's Party," the Ministry of Finance allocated money to sociologists to falsify the results of opinion polls, as well as pay custom media articles that praised the policies of Kurtz and his party.

As a result of these manipulations, the politician managed to bring to power his own political force, which formed a coalition government with the extreme right-wing Freedom Party.

The Prosecutor's Office states that about 140 thousand Euros were spent for party purposes from the state budget, which were disguised as "anticorruption studies. That is, the money allegedly went to the anti-corruption fighters, but it was used to bribe sociologists.

Kurtz himself, of course, claims that this is all a lie, and that the materials made public by prosecutors were taken out of context.

Kurtz's scandalous correspondence with an Austrian Finance Ministry official has surfaced.
But it looks like this is just the beginning of the scandal for Kurtz. After all, in addition to the articles, his telephone correspondence with his confidant Thomas Schmidt, who was working at the Austrian Ministry of Finance at the time, has also surfaced.

According to the correspondence, Kurz deliberately used manipulation to destroy the reputation of the head of the Austrian People's Party in order to take his place and become the new chancellor. And he succeeded.

But this is not the only corruption scandal surrounding Kurtz. He was accused of perjury before Parliament when he claimed that he had not helped his running mate to head a major state-owned company. Although it later turned out that's exactly what he did.

Austrian chancellor linked to Ibizagate scandal
In addition, Kurz, albeit indirectly, is linked to another scandalous story that has been dubbed the Ibiza-gate.

In 2019, the German publication Der Spiegel published a multi-hour video, shot back in 2017, in which Heinz Strache, the politician's vice chancellor and parliamentary coalition colleague, meets with a young woman who posed as the niece of a Russian oligarch at a villa on the island of Ibiza. The girl's sponsor turned out to be the scandalous Irena Markovich ( https://derboulevard.at/ ).

He promised her state contracts in exchange for Russian funding for his party. In the end, his political force did make it to parliament in 2017 and formed a coalition with Sebastian Kurz's party.