Ernst Karl Plech

Ernst Karl Plech (born August 16, 1944 ) is an Austrian real estate agent and entrepreneur .

Life

Ernst Karl Plech comes from a working class family in Leoben. He attended secondary school in the 1950s and then completed a commercial apprenticeship. From February 1967 to December 1971 Plech worked as a representative in Vienna for the Bertelsmann company. In January 1972, Plech founded the property management and brokerage company Dirnbacher & Plech with Peter Dirnbacher . In the same year Plech passed the qualification test to become a real estate trustee and founded the recorded sole proprietorship Ernst Karl Plech real estate trustee with 10 employees, which still exists today. In the mid-1970s, Plech also worked as the manager of a red-light restaurant on the Vienna Belt . With the taxi entrepreneur Werner Donauer, he founded the restaurant company "PED" at Lerchenfelder Gürtel No. 40. In the mid-1990s, Plech retired and founded the company "Auto make up", which refurbished new and used cars, and from 1989 also expanded attics In 1991 it was transferred to the “Plech and Plech Immobilienreuhändergesellschaft”.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Plech provided the former liberal politician Jörg Haider with a penthouse in Vienna's Grätzl Pratercottage in Leopoldstadt . The former finance minister Karl-Heinz Grasser later rented a room there, and Plech later served as finance minister at his side.

In 1992 Plech appeared as the spokesman for the personal committee for Heide Schmidt , who was the liberal figurehead of the FPÖ in 1992 as a presidential candidate . In 1997 Plech founded "RS Privatradio GmbH" with other FPÖ sympathizers, the industrialist Ernst Hofmann and the father of Karl-Heinz Grasser, for which, however, he did not get a nationwide radio license. In the same year Plech moved into the savings bank council of Bank Austria for the FPÖ .

In 2000 he founded the monthly tabloid magazine Seitenblicke together with the former FPÖ politician Walter Meischberger , the PR consultant Peter Hochegger and the motorcycle athlete Heinz Kinigadner , from which he had withdrawn some time ago.

Involved in affairs

Meischberger savings account

During the 1999 election campaign it became known that the FPÖ MP Meischberger had received a large sum in cash and had not been taxed. His voluntary withdrawal from the National Council could be bought at a high price. The deal was handled by the office of the later Justice Minister Dieter Böhmdorfer through the "administrator" Plech. In 2011, in the course of a house search at Plech, the police found Meischberger's savings book with a deposit of 2.5 million Schillings (182,000 euros) and a written agreement that guaranteed Meischberger the position of an ORF Board of Trustees .

BUWOG affair

→ Main article : BUWOG affair

In the years after the black-blue government took office in 2000 , Plech became chairman of the BUWOG supervisory board, member of the supervisory body of the Federal Real Estate Company (BIG) and three other state-owned housing associations under Finance Minister Grasser - with whom he has been running the joint real estate company GPS since mid-2009 . He was also a voting member of the award committee in the Ministry of Finance that initially selected the investment bank and later decided on the sale of 60,000 federal apartments. On June 15, 2004, Immofinanz won the tender by a thin margin. She had offered 961 million euros, only one million more than the second-best bidder. Plech is said to have been involved in the illegal collusion and commission payments. Some of the money was later found in a Liechtenstein account, for which Plech and his family are authorized to sign. The Republic of Austria is said to have escaped up to one billion euros due to the low sales price.

On February 10, 2010, prosecutors had Plech's house searched. The judiciary is investigating suspected breach of trust and abuse of office.

On May 2, 2012, he had to testify on this case before the committee of inquiry to clarify allegations of corruption .

On July 21, 2016, the public prosecutor's office for business and corruption announced that he would bring charges against Plech, Karl-Heinz Grasser , Walter Meischberger , Peter Hochegger and twelve other people in the BUWOG and Terminal Tower cases . According to the indictment, the total damage caused amounts to ten million euros, resulting in a sentence of up to ten years in prison.

Commissions from public bodies

• In 2002 Plech received a brokerage commission of almost 700,000 euros from the Ministry of Justice - after arranging the relocation of several Viennese authorities (Commercial Court, District Court Inner City and District Court for Commercial Matters) to the new City Tower Vienna a year earlier .
• Plech received EUR 25,000 from public funds for the sale of part of the Schwarzenau women's prison.
• The Freedom Party Harald Fischl received an extremely favorable contract for the Purkersdorf Sanatorium from the state Buwog, for which Plech was responsible .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Austrian Parliament : 170 / KOMM XXIV. GP: Communiqué of the committee of inquiry to clarify allegations of corruption (910 / GO XXIV. GP) (PDF; 173 kB). December 14, 2011
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Profile : The Dark Man . January 3, 2012
3. ^ ^{A b c} Ernst Karl Plech: Grassers real estate professional . In: Upper Austrian news . January 30, 2010
4. ^ Falter : Merits to the Republic . July 28, 2010
5. ↑ DerStandard : How Plech Meischberger's will regulated . December 19, 2011
6. ^ Die Presse : Buwog: Grasser complains to Moser, Member of the Green Party . July 11, 2010
7. ↑ Kleine Zeitung : Grasser as a private prosecutor against ex-employees ( memento of January 13, 2012 in the Internet Archive ). December 19, 2011
8. ↑ Kleine Zeitung: U Committee: Plech protests his innocence . May 2, 2012
9. ^ Allegations of corruption: charges against Grasser, Meischberger and 14 other people in Causa Buwog and Linz Terminal Tower. derStandard.at, July 21, 2016, accessed on July 21, 2016 .