Thomas Schmid is something like Sebastian Kurz’s nemesis. Schmid’s around 300,000 chats, which the public prosecutor’s office secured in the course of their Ibiza investigations, have contributed to Kurz having to resign as Chancellor and chairman of the Christian Democratic ÖVP in autumn a year ago. Now it has become known that Schmid also wants to act as a key witness in a legal sense. The public prosecutor’s office announced on Tuesday that he had already expressed this intention in April and has since testified extensively. Kurz was apparently heavily burdened by his former confidante.
Schmid was press spokesman for the ÖVP, then went to the Ministry of Finance, where he was promoted to Secretary General, and under the ÖVP-FPÖ government under Kurz became head of ÖBAG, which is the holding company for corporate investments in the republic. Schmid is being investigated, among other things, because of the allocation of posts at Casinos Austria, because of tax breaks for certain entrepreneurs and because of the advertisement affair. It is said that surveys that favored Kurz party politics were partly doctored and placed in a free sheet and financed directly or indirectly (via advertisements) with taxpayers’ money. Schmid is said to have turned this carousel.
