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full screen Austria’s former chancellor Sebastian Kurz in court in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/AP/TT
Austria’s former chancellor Sebastian Kurz is convicted of perjury by a court in Vienna.
He faced up to three years in prison, but was given an eight-month suspended sentence.
The judge went along with the prosecutors’ line that Sebastian Kurz gave false information during a testimony in a parliamentary inquiry into corruption in 2020.
That investigation dealt, among other things, with the fortunes surrounding the appointment of a management position at a state-owned company, a process in which Kurz played down his own role during the committee hearing.
The former Chancellor claims that he is innocent and that the investigation is politically motivated.
Sebastian Kurz was seen as a political prodigy when, as leader of the conservative ÖVP party, he became Chancellor of Austria in 2017 at the age of 31, after serving as foreign minister. He resigned in the fall of 2021 due to the corruption allegations.