The “brain“of the Ibazagate scandal, which had caused the fall of the Austrian government in 2019, was sentenced on Wednesday March 30 for drug offences, a verdict”devastatingaccording to an NGO suspecting a maneuver to silence him.
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“He was sentenced at first instance to three and a half years of deprivation of liberty for the acts of which he is accused.“, told AFP the vice-president of the regional court of Sankt-Pölten (east) Birgit Eisenmagen. The defense said it would appeal. Julian Hessenthaler, a private detective, was found guilty of cocaine trafficking and concealment of falsified identity documents. The prosecution accused him of having handed over 1.25 kilos of drugs to an acquaintance in 2017 and 2018 for a price per gram of 40 euros and of having presented false papers at a police check in 2019.
This 41-year-old man is at the origin of the most spectacular political scandal observed in Austria, which never stops producing revelations. In 2017, he shot a hidden camera video on the island of Ibiza showing the leader of the far-right FPÖ party Heinz-Christian Strache ready to compromise himself in exchange for secret Russian funding. The broadcast of the sequence in the German media two years later caused the resignation of Christian Strache, then number two in the government and the fall of the coalition between the right and the far right.
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Information of public interest
On the legal front, the episode led to the launch of numerous investigations against political leaders and the former vice-chancellor was sentenced at the end of August to 15 months in prison suspended in one of these corruption cases. Conservative Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and his finance minister, Gernot Blümel, also left politics due to investigations stemming from Ibizagate. In this context, 15 NGOs including Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) consider Julian Hessenthaler as a whistleblower who allowed the publication of information of public interest, and who would have been prosecuted under a false pretext to silence him .
“This trial offers a devastating vision for confidence in the independence of justice and the rule of law“Reacted Thomas Lohninger, director of the Austrian organization epicenter.works associated with the initiative, in a statement sent to AFP. “There was no evidence against the defendant at trial other than the statements of two witnesses“, according to him bribed. For his part, the prosecutor affirmed during the hearing that this trial had “nothing to see” with the Ibiza scandal but that the accusation would be due to a “lucky findof drugs at one of the witnesses, who named Julian Hessenthaler as one of his suppliers.