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Former Austrian finance minister Karl-Heinz Grasser was sentenced Friday to eight years in prison in a 2004 privatization-related bribery case in one of the largest corruption trials in the country.
Grasser was Austria’s youngest finance minister, taking office at the age of 31, in a coalition between former Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel’s conservatives and the far-right FPÖ party, first from the FPÖ and in the subsequent government that he moved to the main party of the coalition. He occupied the portfolio between 2000 and 2007.
Grasser had political mentor Jörg Haider, the FPÖ’s most charismatic leader (who left the party to create another in 2005, and died in a car accident in 2008), but ended up distancing himself from it.
The Vienna court ruled that Grasser caused millions of euros in damages to the state in the privatization of the Buwog housing cooperative. The sale was said to have been made at a low price because Grasser provided the winning company with information on the value of the highest bid, the court said. The company offered only one million euros more than its rival, which had offered 960 million euros.
Grasser and other defendants, also sentenced to shorter prison terms and fines, took part in the bribe given by the winning company – € 9.6 million -, which was split across three accounts in Liechtenstein. The court proved that one of the accounts was from Grasser.
The former finance minister says the three-year process is politically motivated. The lawyer responded to the sentence saying only that he would appeal.
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