Flood the Zone
As the investigation by anti-corruption authorities heats up, the ÖVP stands accused of undermining the work of the WKStA and creating a fog of disinformation
Servus!
On July 25, 2017 at 1:00 pm, the founder and owner of the international gambling giant Novomatic Johann Graf held a routine meeting with someone denoted in his calendar by his secretary as, simply, ‘Kurz.’ One would be forgiven for thinking—as the country’s anti-corruption authorities, the WKStA, seem to have done—that said ‘Kurz’ may have been Sebastian Kurz, at that time Austria’s foreign minister and newly-crowned leader of the ÖVP. But according to Graf’s lawyer, Christopher Schrank, it wasn’t. Instead, the Novomatic owner was meeting with his daughter-in-law and a member of the company’s board of directors, Martina Kurz.
In the context of the WKStA’s ongoing investigation into links financial and political between two political parties, the ÖVP and FPÖ, Novomatic, and the partly state-owned casinos operator Casinos Austria, does this matter? For the ÖVP, it certainly does. The name confusion was enough for August Wöginger, head of the ÖVP’s parliamentary faction, to step out in front of the media last Thursday—at a press conference entitled “The WKStA’s mistakes and false accusations against Gernot Blümel”—in order to bemoan the WKStA’s “transgressions and sloppiness” and declare their investigation “a house of cards.”
To recap: On July 12, 2017, the head of Novomatic, Harald Neumann, sent a message to Blümel, now Austria’s finance minister, at that time Vienna ÖVP party boss, requesting “a short appointment with Kurz (first of all because of a donation and second concerning a problem that we have in Italy.” Three hours later, Blümel texted Thomas Schmid, then-secretary general in the finance ministry: “Please call Neumann back. Do it for me.” Whether or not the above text messages represent a cash-for-favors scandal is now the subject of an investigation by the WKStA. Blümel vehemently denies all allegations and remains in office.
Wöginger’s press conference was evidence of a strategy termed by Donald Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon as ‘flooding the zone with shit’—an approach to information saturation, Sean Illing once explained, which “seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories”: in this case, that the WKStA is in the grip of a network of officials friendly to the Social Democratic Party, or that the WKStA is responsible for leaking details of the investigation to the press. By highlighting and inflating the importance of the Sebastian/Martina mix-up—largely irrelevant to the core question of whether there was a financial and political relationship between Novomatic and the ÖVP—one can generate a certain fog of information and disinformation which may cause people to question the WKStA’s independence, its neutrality, and the basis of the allegations against Blümel and the ÖVP.
On Sunday, chancellor Kurz wrote his own letter to the WKStA, which just happened to end up in all the papers shortly thereafter. “In recent days, Gernot Blümel, the ÖVP, and I have been confronted with an array of false allegations,” he wrote, arguing oxymoronically that “failure-ridden facts” such as the Sebastian/Martina muddle constituted the basis for the WKStA’s investigation. “I would not involve myself publicly in an investigation,” Kurz wrote as he involved himself publicly in an investigation. In this case, he had no choice, for the allegations now reported in both domestic and international media are damaging, he argued, both for the reputation of the federal government and the Republic of Austria.
Herbert Kickl, who leads the FPÖ’s parliamentary faction, called the letter evidence of the ÖVP’s “blind panic.” That the ÖVP now reportedly wishes to see the WKStA reorganized and broken up with some of its functions given over to a newly-formed federal prosecutor’s office would seem to confirm this view. “Since Gernot Blümel’s home was searched, the ÖVP has been firing on all cylinders against the anti-corruption authorities. Nervous much?” Raffaela Lindorfer asked in the Kurier. “After all, the next address [to be searched] could be the chancellor’s.”
Bis bald!
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