That hurts… – Raid Benko’s house – and the Porsche is gone too!

Suddenly they were there – in the otherwise idyllic Igls near Innsbruck! And they probably left a neighbor or two in shock over their morning coffee.

Large police presence, including Cobra
A large police contingent appeared on Tuesday around 7:30 am with masked Cobra officers in front of the luxurious ‘Villa N’ of the Tyrolean real estate juggler René Benko. A drone circled above the house. A short time later, the gates were locked and while his wife Nathalie walked the dog, the investigators on behalf of the WKStA probably turned the building upside down.

That morning, Benko’s lawyer Norbert Wess confirmed that it was a “search to secure all documents related to the allegations already reported in the media.” His client behaved “cooperatively and constructively”.

With metal container from the Herrengasse office
The house searches in Vienna were much quieter. At 7:40 a.m., investigators, accompanied by the public prosecutor, marched into Signa’s headquarters on Herrengasse in the city center. The nearly ten people, women and men in civilian clothes, examined both the former and current Signa offices.

The group left the old location around 9:40 a.m. with a silver-colored metal container containing about 70 to 80 kilograms. A few minutes later, a black bus drove into Freyung and investigators lifted the seized material into it. When approached by the “Krone”, the officers responded curtly: “I would like to ask you to leave this location,” they said. Meanwhile, the search continued at Signa’s current headquarters next door.

Also raided on former financial director Pirolt
Manuel Pirolt, former head of finance, and other Signa executives were also subjected to searches on behalf of the WKStA on Tuesday. Pirolt himself had publicly protested his innocence in some Austrian media the week before. In total, there were raids at five to ten locations. The soup for René Benko is getting thinner.