(Bloomberg) — Editors at two major Austrian news organizations were suspended after text messages in the possession of public prosecutors showed them cozying up to senior government officials.
The announcements are the latest fallout from a wide-ranging corruption probe with origins in the so-called Ibiza video that toppled Sebastian Kurz’s government in 2019 and led to his departure from politics in 2021.
Messages confiscated from the phone of Thomas Schmid, the Finance Ministry’s top civil servant, as well other senior officials, have roiled Austrians by showing them the inner dealings between government and business. Prosecutors are investigating multiple alleged accounts of corruption based on the messages.
After the most recent revelations, Styria Media Group AG suspended Rainer Nowak from his duty as editor-in-chief of Vienna daily newspaper Die Presse. Messages sent between 2017 and 2019 appeared to show him seeking Schmid’s help for a senior position at the country’s public broadcaster ORF. Messages also suggested that the longtime executive was asked to intervene in stories at the request of Schmid, according to texts first published by Der Standard newspaper.
Nowak apologized in a statement for the inappropriate tone of the messages but said the conversations were never reflected in stories published by the paper.
Separately, Matthias Schrom went on leave as news director of ORF after discussing the perceived influence of the Social Democratic Party on public media with Heinz-Christian Strache, who led the the right-wing populist Freedom Party and was Austria’s vice chancellor at the time.
ORF said that Schrom wrote in a letter to the newsroom that Strache’s interventions didn’t affect editorial decisions and came amid a time of great political pressure on the channel.
The hundreds of thousands of text messages confiscated by prosecutors paint a sobering picture of how members of Austria’s business, political and media elite interact. President Alexander Van der Bellen has called for rebuilding trust in politics.
Schmid has sought status as a crown witness in the investigations that forced Kurz to resign as chancellor last year. His testimony also prompted authorities to search the offices or Austrian billionaire Rene Benko’s companies.
