A jury at the Vienna Regional Criminal Court has found Egisto Ott, a former employee of Austria’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism (BVT), guilty of spying for Russia. Ott, who also worked as an aide to the fraudster Jan Marsalek, who is hiding in Moscow and working for the Russian intelligence services, was sentenced to four years and one month in prison, according to a report by local outlet Profil.
Ott was also convicted of abuse of office, corruption, embezzlement, disclosing state secrets, and violating the Foreign Trade Act. He denied all charges at the final hearing, as he had throughout the trial. The jury deliberated for more than eight hours.
Ott was arrested in March 2024 after a joint investigation by The Insider and Der Spiegel reported that he had worked for Marsalek, the Wirecard COO who fled to Russia in 2020. A few days later, Ott was released from custody pending investigation. Ott took part in the surveillance of The Insider’s lead investigator Christo Grozev and editor-in-chief Roman Dobrokhotov. Correspondence between Marsalek and his subordinates suggests the purpose of the surveillance was their kidnapping or murder.
As early as 2017, foreign intelligence services, believed to include the CIA and MI6, raised concerns about Ott. He had repeatedly forwarded data from his official BVT email address to a personal account and was suspected of spying for Russia. At the time, Ott’s direct superior at the BVT was Martin Weiss, another Marsalek associate. Ott was suspended, but his agent network continued to operate.
