In a fraud trial as a result of the "Ibiza" investigations, the former Austrian Minister of Family Affairs Sophie Karmasin was found guilty of part of the indictment in Vienna on Tuesday. She was sentenced to 15 months in prison, which is suspended. The verdict is not yet final.

Stephan Löwenstein

Political correspondent based in Vienna.

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After leaving the government in 2017, Karmasin returned to her former profession as a market and opinion researcher and, according to the court's findings, incited anti-competitive agreements. However, she was acquitted of the charge of serious fraud.

If it stays that way, it would be the first final conviction in one of the countless investigations that the Public Prosecutor's Office for Economic Affairs and Corruption (WKStA) has taken up in the wake of the "Ibiza affair". The non-partisan entrepreneur was appointed to the government in 2013 by the then ÖVP chairman and Vice Chancellor Michael Spindelegger.

Bogus offers undercut

The prosecution had accused Karmasin of having acquired several orders from the Ministry of Sports by inducing other companies to make bogus offers and then undercutting them. The court followed suit. On the other hand, an official of the Ministry of Sport, who was also accused, was acquitted because he could not be proven to have deliberately committed illegal acts.

Karmasin was also accused because she initially concealed her income and thus unjustly collected transitional money. Retiring cabinet members are entitled to these continued payments for six months, unless they generate income elsewhere. The court now found that it had been "beyond doubt" that she knowingly and intentionally received the money wrongly. But she was to be acquitted of active repentance because she had repaid the amount "just in time".

Her former colleague Sabine Beinschab, who founded her own opinion research company when her boss went into politics, testified against Karmasin. In the course of the WKStA's investigations against the former Federal Chancellor and ÖVP politician Sebastian Kurz in the advertisement affair, the so-called "Beinschab Austria Tool" became known in internal chats: a triangular deal in which, according to the investigators' suspicion, surveys in the sense of Kurz were commissioned at the expense of the Ministry of Finance, i.e. the taxpayer, at Beinschab and placed in the tabloid "Austria". Kurz and the media group "Austria" have rejected the allegations.