Austrian spy accused of selling ministers’ phone data to Russia after British tip off
An Austrian spy with suspected links to a fugitive former executive has been arrested on suspicion of selling confidential information to Russia after a British tip-off.
Egisto Ott was arrested on Friday, accused of cloning the phones of senior interior ministry figures and transferring sensitive data to people linked to Russian intelligence.
The three smartphones had been handed to another Austrian agent, who has also been arrested, for water damage repair, when the senior advisers to whom they belonged capsized on a departmental canoeing trip in the summer of 2017.
The phones were cloned and their information passed to Ott, a former agent of Austria’s now-dissolved security service the Office of Constitutional Protection. He sold the information to Martin Weiss, a former department head of the same agency.
Weiss, in turn, is believed to have been on the payroll of Jan Marsalek, the disgraced former head of collapsed German payment firm Wirecard, Austrian broadsheet Der Standard reports.
The phones belonged to Michael Kloibmüller, a former head of the cabinet of the Austrian interior ministry, Michael Takacs, a director of federal police, and Garnot Maier, the director of the federal office for immigration and asylum.
Information from Mr Kloibmüller’s phone was sent to prosecutors and Austrian media, leading to now-dropped corruption investigations against Wolfgang Sobotka, the president of the Austrian parliament, a former interior minister, and Kloibmüller himself.
Ott is now in protective custody. The information leading to his arrest initially came from a British investigation into a Bulgarian spy ring Marsalek allegedly set up in the UK.
Marselek reportedly spied for the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, for decades, according to chats seen by the British investigators.
Seven years of suspicion
Ott has been suspected of selling secrets for around seven years now, with the case file reportedly thousands of pages thick.
The former spy admitted to Der Spiegel, the German magazine, that he complied with a request from Weiss to provide the address of Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian-born investigative journalist at Bellingcat.
“I only went to the registration office and paid €3.40 [£2.90] for the information about where [Grozev] lives,” he claimed.
Ott and Weiss may even have played a role in the sabotage and dissolution of their own intelligence agency by forming a cell that released secrets about the forging of North Korean passports, on Marsalek’s orders.
The leak led to a scandalous raid on the agency by Herbert Kickl, the then-interior minister, now leader of the far-Right Freedom Party (FPÖ).
The governing Greens accused the FPÖ of collaboration with Moscow. “The FPÖ have in reality been working for Russia and its unscrupulous dictator rather than Austria for years,” a senior Green MP said.
