Austria’s former family minister Sophie Karmasin is said to play a central role in the corruption scandal surrounding glossed-over opinion polls in which ex-Chancellor Kurz is involved. Now she is also charged with unlawful continued payment of wages.
Former Austrian family minister Sophie Karmasin has been charged with allegedly unlawfully continuing to pay wages after leaving politics. The conservative ex-minister is accused of serious fraud and inciting anti-competitive agreements.
The Vienna Regional Court confirmed that it had received the indictment from the Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. According to the indictment, following her ministerial career from the end of 2017 to mid-2018, Karmasin illegally received government salaries of more than 78,000 euros. She said she was earning nothing, but in fact she immediately went back to her former job as a pollster, it said.
She also got two other pollsters to submit agreed-upon offers for studies for the Ministry of Sports, which Karmasin then undercut. Karmasin’s lawyer has denied the allegations in the past. She paid back the salary to the state.
Additional investigations are ongoing against Karmasin in connection with government advertisements and allegedly glossed-over opinion polls. The public prosecutor’s office is investigating the suspicion that a group led by former Chancellor Sebstian Kurz, ÖVP, illegally diverted tax money to publish the embellished polls in a tabloid newspaper. With the exception of a former confidant of Kurz, all suspects in this case have protested their innocence.
In March it was reported that Karmasin was also detained for a time because of her central role in the poll affair. The 55-year-old was Minister for Family Affairs from 2013 to 2017 and then returned to opinion research.
