Former Wirecard executive Jan Marsalek claimed to be involved in a Kremlin-associated operation to bring down the former chancellor, The Telegraph reported.
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Kurz stepped down in 2021 amid allegations of corruption, bribery, and breach of trust.
The Telegraph reported that Marsalek sent messages directly stating his role in ousting Kurz to his ringleader, Orlin Roussev, who is currently imprisoned in the UK.
If Marsalek’s allegations are true, it would indicate that the Kremlin is directly interfering in European political leadership.
The Telegraph report comes as multiple countries’ security agencies have assessed that the Kremlin is aiming to destabilize governments across Europe and sow chaos across the continent.
Marsalek disappeared five years ago after Wirecard collapsed in 2020, owing creditors almost $4 billion. He is now an international fugitive, and his whereabouts are unknown.
Since his disappearance, British authorities have revealed that he is a Russian spy directing espionage operations across Europe on an “industrial” scale.
He is being investigated for spying on behalf of Russia in Germany, Austria, and the UK.
When Marsalek’s ringleader Roussev was arrested in 2023, police found thousands of messages between him and Marsalek, who directed the unit of Bulgarian nationals from overseas.
The conversations between Marsalek and Roussev were key to “identifying how this group acted and were tasked,” police commander Murphy said, and included references to Russia’s GRU military intelligence and jokes about the nerve agent Novichok, used to target Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, in 2018.
UK authorities later shared these messages with other European police forces, primarily the Austrians, who are now investigating the extent to which their spies provided Marsalek with information.
The Telegraph reviewed an Austrian investigative file detailing messages Marsalek sent under the alias “Rupert Ticz” in 2021.
In the messages, Marsalek says a guy who was “actually working for us for a while” is now “the victim of a witch hunt by the team of the former chancellor.”
According to The Telegraph, Marsalek then says “we’ve successfully toppled” Kurz “by confiscating the mobile phone” of the person “who’s managing their secret campaign financing.”
He then shared a link to an article about Kurz’s corruption allegations and a phone that was seized by one of the former chancellor’s close advisers, Thomas Schmid.
Schmid’s phone was seized in 2019, and the messages on it became important evidence for corruption investigations.
Kurz stepped down in 2021 after investigations into his ÖVP party for misusing public funds to secure favorable media coverage.
Two weeks after Kurz stepped down, Marsalek wrote Roussev that the entire situation was “quite a messy story,” according to The Telegraph.
He referred to the phone again later in the conversation, noting that “the rest of the chats ‘killed’ the chancellor.”
The Telegraph noted that the files contain no independent evidence that Marsalek organized the seizure of the phone.
