Former Austrian intelligence officer Egisto Ott is facing a criminal indictment, accused of corruption and spying for Russia by supplying an encrypted laptop and leaking sensitive information for years, prosecutors said Friday.
Ott, who previously worked for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter-Terrorism (BVT), which was then Austria's main domestic intelligence agency, was arrested in March 2024 on suspicion of espionage.
Vienna prosecutors said in a statement they were filing a lawsuit against Ott and an unidentified police officer, alleging criminal offenses including working for or supporting an intelligence agency to the detriment of Austria, bribery, abuse of office and violation of official secrecy.
The statement said that Ott is accused, among other things, of supporting an unspecified Russian intelligence agency by “collecting secret information and a large amount of personal data from police databases between 2017 and 2021 with the aim of transmitting them to Jan Marsalek and unknown representatives of the Russian intelligence service.”
He added that Ott allegedly received payment in exchange.
Marsalek is the fugitive former chief operating officer of German payments company Wirecard, which collapsed in a scandal in 2020, owing creditors almost $4 billion. Marsalek has been on the run ever since.
A London court found this year that he had run a network of Bulgarian spies in Britain working for Russia.
Ott is also accused of supplying, on Marsalek's orders, a so-called SINA-S laptop, including equipment used by European Union governments for secure communications, to an unknown person in exchange for 20,000 euros ($23,000). The laptop was then handed over to a Russian intelligence agency.
(BalkanWeb)
