After canceling twice, René Benko, currently the most controversial Austrian entrepreneur, came to the Cofaq investigative committee in the Vienna Parliament on Wednesday morning. This was set up by the SPÖ and FPÖ to examine the “preference for billionaires by ÖVP government members”. Benko had been threatened that he would be brought before the police if he refused to be questioned on the last day of the meeting.
Benko had again said that he did not want to incriminate himself; There are several criminal proceedings pending against him. The insolvent real estate investor and founder of the also insolvent Signa Holding should be questioned about possible privileged treatment in tax matters and about possible overfinancing of Signa by the Covid financing agency Cofaq.
In fact, the day went more or less as expected. Benko, who probably came because he wanted to avoid the embarrassment of a forced appearance and did not want to strengthen his reputation as a man who has his own rules, answered the MPs’ questions very generally. He said of the former Signa supervisory board chairman and former SPÖ chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, who used his contacts in Berlin to obtain financial aid for Karstadt-Kaufhof and received a million-euro fee, that he “took his job very seriously”. Sebastian Kurz, former ÖVP chancellor and Signa consultant, was “well connected”.
The witness’s questioning sometimes turned bizarre – for example, when he was asked whether he had named a ship Roma which he confirmed because it was his own yacht. Or when he discussed with MPs whether he knew Lake Garda. Benko lived for a time in a villa on Lake Garda that was owned by Signa and where legendary company and private parties were held. Apart from that, the tanned Innsbruck native, who had not been seen in public for a long time, could not remember much.
Benko did not want to comment even vaguely on key questions that would also be of interest to insolvency administrators and courts, such as whether Benko was actually managing the business, details of disputed tax issues and the use of various properties. Ultimately, the MPs decided to apply for a coercive penalty because the witness did not want to answer questions about visitors to Chalet N, a villa in Kitzbühel.