The outgoing secretary general of the chancellery and the head of Section I, Kurz’s confidant Bernd Brünner, was also questioned by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Corruption (WKStA). As announced on Thursday, he will step down from both positions on October 31 “for personal reasons”. Brunner’s resignation is coming soon, eight days to be exact, after he was questioned by the WKStA.
The Ö1-Mittagsjournal reported on Friday that Brünner could not remember appointments as Thomas Schmid had described for the WKStA. Thomas Schmid had testified before the WKStA that in the summer of 2018, as Secretary General of the Ministry of Finance, he had to inform Sebastian Kurz’s employees about all positions to be filled in state holding companies. Then a group around Kurz, Brünner, Bernhard Bonelli, Axel Melchior and Gernot Blümel tackled it.
Faced with chat message
Brünner could not recall such chats and conversations when questioned by the WKStA. A prosecutor then confronted him, Brünner, with a chat message he wrote, according to the Mittagsjournal: “Please quickly send me all the names on the postal surveillance board, including a note of who is new and who was already there, and also ask for information about who is/will be the chairman of the supervisory board”.
Brunner has not commented on this. According to a spokesperson for Chancellor Karl Nehammer (ÖVP), “everything has been said” about the change. A spokesman for Kurz attorney Werner Suppan saw his client relieved by Brünner’s statements: “It is a good sign that this case is being concluded.”
Source: Krone
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