Intertrading scandal

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The Intertrading scandal was a scandal that broke out at the end of 1985 about heavy speculative losses by the Austrian trading company Intertrading, a subsidiary of the Voest Alpine Group . It led to the dismissal of the entire board of directors of the parent company, to a general nationalization crisis in Austria and subsequently to the privatization of large parts of the previously nationalized economy.

Intertrading was founded to sell goods that came under the control of the steel producer Voest-Alpine through compensation deals with countries of the Warsaw Pact . In the course of time, however, the sphere of activity of Intertrading had expanded and it was present as a player on the international commodity markets.

On November 19, 1985, Heribert Apfalter , the general director of VÖEST, had to admit at a meeting in the office of the nationalized holding ÖIAG that Intertrading and its managing director Gernot Preschern losses of at least 5.7 billion schillings in bearish speculations on the oil market (the equivalent of 414 million euros) had suffered. ÖIAG boss Oskar Grünwald , who had not previously been informed about these highly speculative transactions, then called the responsible Federal Minister for Public Economics and Transport Ferdinand Lacina , who, after consulting with Federal Chancellor Fred Sinowatz, obtained the resignation of the entire VÖEST board, which Lacina on November 26, 1985 at a press conference called at short notice.

The nationalized industry had already posted enormous losses - between 1981 and 1983 alone, government grants amounted to over 1.5 billion euros. “For the ideologues of the nationalized industry, the intertrading disaster must have been as if a Catholic went to church and found a brothel there ,” Gerhard Pretting quotes Claus Raidl , then a board member at ÖIAG.

At the end of November 1985, at the suggestion of Franz Ruhaltinger , the powerful central works council chairman of Voest-Alpine, Lacina initially appointed Richard Kirchweger , the former general director of Chemie Linz AG , as the new general director of Voest-Alpine-AG. A little later, however, it became known that Merx, the trading company of Chemie Linz AG, had also made heavy losses with similar businesses to Intertrading. On February 14, 1986, Kirchweger had to resign.

The nationalized crisis of 1985–1986 was the turning point in Austrian economic policy. After an annual loss of 850 million euros in 1985, the large Voest-Alpine group was dismantled, massive staff reductions and, as a result, gradual privatization. This was now also supported by the top social democratic politicians such as Franz Vranitzky (since 1986 Federal Chancellor) and Ferdinand Lacina, finance minister since 1986.

In the opinion of the defeated SPÖ presidential candidate Kurt Steyrer , the severe crisis in the nationalized industry was one of the two main factors behind the “memo election” that led Kurt Waldheim to the office of Federal President in 1986. (Steyrer named the campaign against Waldheim as another essential factor, which had led to “solidarity among the war generation” and also to a stronger media presence for Waldheim.)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Grünwald: "Party influence had nothing to do with the VOEST debacle" . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna November 29, 1985, p. 4 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).
  2. ↑ a b After resignation from the Board of Management: Kirchweger new VOEST boss . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna November 27, 1985, p. 2 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).
  3. ↑ See “Stahlgewitter” by Gerhard Pretting in brand eins 07/2006.
  4. ↑ " Solving problems carefully but hard ..." In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna December 2, 1985, p. 2 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).
  5. ^ ORF obituary for Kurt Steyrer from April 11, 2012 .

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