160,000 euros damage

Electrician stole from his employer and sold goods

The 35-year-old was put on trial at Leoben Regional Court

(Bild: Jürgen Radspieler)

An electrician stole from his employer for a year and sold the electronic devices on the Internet. Damage: 160,000 euros! Suspicion was aroused during an inventory at the well-known Styrian company. The man recently stood trial.

A former company electrician (35) recently had to attend an extremely unpleasant hearing: he had to answer to criminal judge Roman Weiß at the Leoben Regional Criminal Court for aggravated commercial theft and suppression of evidence. The background: from July 2023, he stole electronic devices from the storeroom of the company he worked for. These included around 38 expensive CPU control units and displays. He sold these via an online platform. The game went on for over a year until he had made a loss of around 160,000 euros.

Caught out during an inventory
But then the inevitable happened: during a stocktake, employees of the well-known Styrian company noticed that the parts were missing and went on an intensive search. Both in the building and on the internet. They found what they were looking for on the aforementioned sales platform. They contacted the person listed there and came across the defendant's ex-partner. That's how things got rolling...

The Styrian realized that he had now been exposed when his new partner called him and said that the police were waiting outside his apartment. He was at work at the time. After hearing that the police were after him, he quickly deleted his Willhaben account, thinking he could cover his tracks. But he was wrong!

Judge Roman Weiß

(Bild: Heinz Weeber)

"Ex" also has to stand trial
The 35-year-old was deeply remorseful in front of criminal judge Roman Weiß. He had major financial problems and did not know how else to help himself. He was finally sentenced to 18 months in prison, three of them unconditional. The defendant accepted the sentence, the public prosecutor's office made no statement. 

Incidentally, the ex-partner of the former company electrician - he has of course lost his job - will also have to answer to the criminal court in the near future. "The public prosecutor's office has filed a criminal complaint for receiving stolen goods," confirms spokeswoman Viktoria Steinecker. In at least one case, she is alleged to have packed a CPU control unit in a parcel and sent it to the post office.