On Wednesday, the “Mission Statement” project, conducted by pollster Sophie Karmasin from 2019 to 2020, was discussed in the ÖVP Corruption U committee. Ex-secretary general Michael Esterl and then deputy chief of staff Schramböck, Paul Rockenbauer, were questioned. According to Esterl, Karmasin’s company was the best and cheapest bidder. In total, however, only 100,000 euros should have been spent on it, in fact it was more than 125,000 euros.
According to Esterl, this has to do with the fact that the process took two years because it was interrupted by the end of the turquoise-blue coalition and complicated by the corona pandemic. The ex-secretary-general was not responsible for the award himself. The HR department took care of that. “My job was a strategic management task. I was not involved in the operational implementation,” said Esterl. He was interrogated because ex-Minister of Economy Margarete Schramböck (ÖVP) was absent because of corna.
“Below the tender threshold”
In addition, they remained in the “below the threshold” for a tender of 100,000 euros. There were also competitors and candidates, but Karmasin’s company turned out to be the best and cheapest bidder. When asked about the output, the former Secretary General spoke of improved cooperation between the units of the Ministry of Economic Affairs. There was about a big online process.
non-specialist questions
Criticism came from SPÖ party chairman Jan Krainer, who confronted Esterl with the fact that the surveys also contained non-specialist questions. Immediately before the elections in Vienna, the ministry commissioned surveys on topics such as internal security, the social system and the performance of the opposition. Esterl replied that he could not remember all the questions in detail, but that many subjects were important to Austria as a place of business.
Project “Weapons Shop Austria”
Another part of the research was the ‘Kaufhaus Österreich’ project, an online shopping platform of the Chamber of Commerce and the Ministry. This flopped after a short time and cost 1.2 million euros. According to SPÖ’s calculations, that should have been 1.8 million euros. The idea of this platform was born during the corona pandemic to help local businesses, Esterl said. He admitted mistakes were made, such as the search function not working.
Paul Rockenbauer, Margarete Schramböck’s deputy private secretary at the time, spoke only in the evenings. He denied that the VP club could have benefited from the results of the poll. Surveys about the corona pandemic, for example, were just as important to the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
Source: Krone
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