The Federal Court of Auditors issued a devastating testimony to Department 13 in its final report on EIA procedures in Styria: As reported, decisions were agreed in advance with builders or their lawyers, and for years there was no political control whatsoever. A special control committee is approaching.
After the “Krone” in November 2021 brought the affair of allegedly unlawfully completed large-scale projects in Styria to light, the public prosecutor’s office and later also the Federal Court of Auditors began investigations. In February of this year the bang came: The Court of Appeal confirmed all the allegations in the room EIA procedure in Styria in a raw report. From 104 to 120 pages, the final variant was published on Friday morning – but only the number of pages changed in the report (from 104 to 120), the content remained the same. This was shown by the audit by the Court of Auditors For example, that “for at least three procedures, there was e-mail traffic from the project applicants’ representatives to employees of the EIA authority, which contained parts of the text or formulations of the respective decisions”. Representatives of the EIA authority of the project applicants submitted drafts of decisions for voting in at least two procedures. Criminal consequences? Both allegations are extremely serious, since approval procedures and the creation of decisions are so-called sovereign core tasks. In other words: These tasks may not be outsourced to external parties by law. The RH specifically lists three projects, here is the verbatim excerpt: Revisions by a lawyer were found in part identically in a preliminary complaint decision by the district authority for a motorsport event. In the EIA approval procedure for the Koralm pumped storage power plant, the managing director of a planning office (she is one of the accused against whom the public prosecutor is investigating, editor’s note) sent parts of the text to a then EIA officer, for example on the nature compatibility test and the weighing of interests. Most of these were found word-identically in the decision of September 2021. In the case of an EIA change permit regarding water law for a waste treatment plant in St. Michael in Upper Styria, the then managing director of a planning office, which represented the project applicant, sent a then EIA officer in November 2020 text parts on ruling points, water law consensus quantities and conditions, most of which are word-identical in the decision of December 2020. Finally, the RH recommends, among other things, to ensure “that sovereign core tasks are carried out by the responsible authority itself”. and an organizational structure prone to corruption. For many years, the state’s environmental department was run down and run completely incompetently by the SPÖ environmental councillors: Leichtfried, Lang and Lackner, without assuming any political responsibility. Something like this must never happen again.” Since “many environmentally relevant projects were not examined with the required quality of a constitutional state”, an “apology from Lackner” is expected. In addition, the opposition politician is pushing for a special control committee.Lackner “shaken” SPÖ environmental councilor Ursula Lackner is also “shaken by the events that the report of the Court of Auditors has brought to light” when asked by “Krone”. And she emphasizes that in would have done a lot in the last few months: “The department has been restructured, new employees have been hired, new internal control mechanisms and its own specialist supervision for the EIA area have been established. The HR department has also drawn conclusions, which I very much welcome”. Plans announced at the beginning of the year to separate nature conservation from the A13 and thus separate it from plant construction have already progressed? “We have now restructured the department and upgraded it with more staff so that it can carry out its tasks. This process will be tightly meshed and precisely evaluated in order to assess whether and which further steps are necessary. The range extends from an additional personnel package to further structural changes”. And not only that: “The state government must no longer tolerate the abuses in Department 13. If Lackner does not go himself, the governor Ursula Lackner must ask for his resignation,” said club chairman Niko Swatek. Here is the entire RH report.
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