A former Austrian intelligence officer, Egisto Ott, is facing criminal charges, accused of corruption and espionage on behalf of Russia by supplying an encrypted laptop and leaking sensitive information over several years, prosecutors announced on Friday.
Ott, who previously worked for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism (BVT)—then Austria’s primary domestic intelligence agency—was arrested in March 2024 on suspicion of espionage.
Vienna prosecutors stated in a release that they are pressing charges against Ott and an unidentified police officer, alleging criminal offenses including working for or supporting a foreign intelligence agency to the detriment of Austria, bribery, abuse of office, and violation of official secrets.
The statement detailed that Ott is accused, among other things, of assisting an unspecified Russian intelligence agency by “collecting classified information and a significant amount of personal data from police databases between 2017 and 2021 for transmission to Jan Marsalek and unknown representatives of the Russian intelligence service.”
Prosecutors added that Ott allegedly received payment in exchange.
Jan Marsalek is the fugitive former COO of the German payments company Wirecard, which collapsed in a 2020 scandal leaving creditors nearly $4 billion unpaid. Marsalek has been in hiding since then.
A London court revealed this year that Marsalek had directed a network of Bulgarian spies in the UK working for Russia.
Ott is also accused of supplying, under Marsalek’s instructions, a so-called SINA-S laptop—including equipment used by European Union governments for secure communications—to an unidentified individual in exchange for €20,000 ($23,000). The laptop was subsequently delivered to a Russian intelligence agency.
