As affable as ever, Sebastian Kurz welcomed the reporters who had come to the provisional parliamentary rooms in the Vienna Hofburg on Wednesday: "We haven't seen each other for a long time." But it was not a class reunion to which the former Austrian Chancellor has arrived.

Kurz was an invited witness - "information person" - in a committee dealing with the time when he was party chairman of the ÖVP and whose official short title is already judging: "ÖVP Corruption Investigation Committee".

Stephen Lowenstein

Political correspondent based in Vienna.

  • Follow I follow

There were no expectations of sensational revelations by Kurz - the sensation is the former chancellor himself, although he says he has completely and finally withdrawn from politics.

Two investigations by the Corruption Prosecutor's Office are still pending against him.

One is about the advertisements affair: Comrades-in-arms are said to have commissioned surveys that Kurz used in his personal career, but were paid for by the public sector through advertisements.

The other is about the allegation of false testimony in a previous U-committee.

For this reason alone it was to be expected that Kurz would refrain from making concrete statements as far as possible.

There was even a live ticker

So the opposition tried it with a topic that is much more topical anyway: How did it come about that (also) during Kurz's term of office, extensive and long-term gas contracts were concluded between the partially state-owned OMV and Russia?

Kurz essentially said that although he was informed of OMV's intentions, the company made the decisions.

It is nothing unusual for him to be seen in a photo with Vladimir Putin when the contract was signed.

And the former OMV boss Rainer Seele was known to be pro-Russian, but that was probably seen as an advantage when he was appointed in 2015, and by the way he wasn't even chancellor at the time.

And the "side letters" to the coalition agreements, in which discreet posts were agreed between the ÖVP and the FPÖ or between the ÖVP and the Greens, including posts in the ORF and the Constitutional Court that are not assigned by the government?

Such agreements have always existed and will probably always exist, said Kurz.

Agreeing on the rules of the game is not indecent, he never announced "Management by Chaos".

The FPÖ deputy Christian Hafenecker had added a spicy note to the story in advance, because of something that in itself has nothing to do with the U-Committee.

On Tuesday it became known that the public prosecutor's office was investigating Hafenecker and some of his people.

He is said to have used fake corona test certificates to attend a football match in Hungary at a time when such visits were tied to a negative test.

The tip came from a cellphone belonging to another FPÖ politician in connection with Ibiza investigations.

Hafenecker rejected the allegations and made a connection to the U-Committee by assuming a kind of conspiracy of ÖVP cliques in the judiciary and police with a view to the meeting on Wednesday: They wanted to distract from Kurz.

Would that have been the intention

so it would have failed.

Despite the manageable content of the statements, Kurz was a topic on all Austrian news sites, and many brought live tickers.