Investigation closed

Waldhäusl: “I don’t need a lawyer for justice”

"Too bad about the money", says Gottfried Waldhäusl (FPÖ) in the "Krone" interview.

(Bild: Attila Molnar)

An anonymous complaint prompted the public prosecutor's office to open an investigation into the Second President of the Lower Austrian Parliament Gottfried Waldhäusl last year. It demanded the extradition of the Lower Austrian parliament. Waldhäusl handed himself in for "swift clarification" and did not even hire a lawyer "for this nonsense", as he himself says. The case has now been closed. 

It concerned an anonymous complaint about incidents between 2008 and 2019, which was actually against a former employee who received his salary from state funds and - according to the allegation - made false expense claims. It also concerned vacations taken by Waldhäusl's later wife during her time in office. (He was still married to another woman at the time). Even then, the Second President of the Provincial Parliament, Gottfried Waldhäusl (FPÖ), dismissed these allegations as "slander and dirty stories". 

In the previous year, the public prosecutor's office then demanded that the FPÖ politician's political immunity from the Lower Austrian state parliament be lifted because "on a realistic view" there was reason to suspect that the employee had acted on Waldhäusl's instructions. The public prosecutor's office also conceded that "the suspicion is still not very concrete at this early stage of the proceedings". The defendant, on the other hand, described it as a "hunt by the public prosecutor's office", partly because none of those involved had been proven guilty. 

Vest remains criminally clean
The public prosecutor's office has now dropped all investigations into the case. "I immediately said at the time that this was a dirt bucket story. Once again, they simply wanted to frame me," the Second President of the State Parliament continues to emphasize that he has a "clean slate" under criminal law. The FPÖ politician has already been the subject of more than ten judicial investigations. Once he even ended up in court - for abuse of office as a provincial councillor because a barbed wire fence was erected in the Drasenhofen asylum shelter in the district of Mistelbach.

"Pity about the money for pure nonsense"
"I knew that this was pure nonsense and completely unfounded. That's why I didn't hire a lawyer for the proceedings and sat down myself. That would have been a shame for the money," emphasizes Gottfried Waldhäusl. As in all investigations against him, almost all of which were dropped before charges were brought, he had always said that the allegations would not be proven. However, he is worried because the public prosecutor's office should rather invest their valuable time in prosecuting violent criminals.