Saturday 30th October 2021
Connection to the Wirecard scandal?
Viennese diplomat leaked Novichok files
An employee of the Austrian Foreign Ministry passed on secret papers about a Novichok attack to a constitutional security officer. He works as a spy for Russia. The authorities find out about the two because Wirecard manager Marsalek is bragging about it.
A recently suspended high-ranking Austrian diplomat is said to have passed on confidential documents on the neurotoxin Novitschok and the affair of the poisoned Russian double agent Sergei Skripal. As the Austrian newspapers “Die Presse” and “Standard” reported, citing court documents, the then Secretary General of the Foreign Ministry, Johannes Peterlik, sent the documents to a former Austrian secret service officer who is said to have spied for Russia in October 2018.
On request, the Austrian Foreign Ministry announced that Peterlik had been dismissed from his most recent position as ambassador to Indonesia in mid-October as a result of an investigation. Details of the allegations were not officially given.
According to media reports, the Austrian authorities had received the Novichok documents in question from the “Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons” (OPCW). Peterlik then requested this and presumably passed it on. The documents therefore contained information on the Novichok formula and the poison attack on Skripal in March 2018 in Salisbury, UK. “International cooperation in the field of intelligence was endangered,” “Die Presse” quoted the investigators as saying.
Marsalek’s role is still unclear
The investigations were therefore set in motion in the course of the investigation of the Wirecard scandal: for example, Wirecard manager Jan Marsalek, an Austrian, who went into hiding, bragged a few weeks later in London about the secret OPCW documents, whose Austrian origin was proven with a barcode can be. How Marsalek, for his part, got the documents is apparently unclear so far.
Former Wirecard boss Markus Braun and two other ex-board members were arrested in July 2020. Marsalek fled, he is wanted on an international arrest warrant. Braun made a statement in May about his communications advisor in “Zeit”. He claims to have found out about the billion-dollar fraud only from the investigators’ files. He put the responsibility on his former business partner Marsalek.