Bizarre trial for the procurement of interceptors, in which ex-Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Grasser testified on the last day as a witness to the events in 2002. Ultimately it turned out – they are statute-barred! There were non-binding acquittals against two accused lobbyists.
He’s been dead for almost 14 years – and yet Jörg Haider is the subject on the last day of the trial against two lobbyists over the procurement of the Eurofighter. The former Carinthian politician appeared in the calendar entries of the accused (lawyer J. Pauer) under “J. Laider” – and a second name also appears familiar: “KH Lasser”. However, Karl-Heinz Grasser does not feel addressed, as he says with a smile to judge Christian Böhm. The former Minister of Finance only had to go up one floor in the Vienna Regional Court on Tuesday – on the 2nd floor he is accused of tax evasion and was allowed to “skip” his own trial briefly because of the summons to witness “Where’s the performance?” He can’t remember much of what happened in 2002 with the Eurofighter deal. Not to the English company “City Chambers” – in which the accused lobbyists are said to have been in charge. And above all, not of the 100 million Schilling money flow from Eurofighter there, to which WKStA senior public prosecutor Beatrix Winkler quotes the well-known question about “Where is the service?” and cannot find it – because the deal with the government ( black and blue at the time) had long since been completed. But KHG can well remember Haider’s “fickleness”: “His political opportunism was legendary. If the majority of the population is against it, so am I. Haider voted for it in the government, but in Carinthia he had ‘No to the Eurofighter’ placarded.” “Amateur contract” A Eurofighter manager defended the lobbyist contract, to which the associate judge Georg Olschak laconically remarked: “If you agree to something like that submits to the bar exam, you never have to take it again, it’s so amateurish!” Judge Christian Böhm did not finally acquit the lobbyists of the charge of infidelity. It has not been clarified with certainty whether the Eurofighter manufacturer EADS was harmed at all. On the other hand, the allegations of infidelity are time-barred.
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