A Vienna jury has found Egisto Ott, a 63-year-old former Austrian intelligence officer, guilty of spying for Russia in what has been described as the biggest espionage scandal the country has seen in decades. Ott was sentenced to four years and one month in prison and convicted on multiple counts, including spying, misuse of office, bribery, aggravated fraud and breach of trust. His lawyer has filed an appeal against the verdict.
The court heard that between 2015 and 2020, during his time as an officer with Austria's domestic intelligence service, Ott collected classified information and large volumes of personal data from police databases and passed them to Russian intelligence. Among the material he allegedly handed over were the contents of work phones belonging to senior Austrian interior ministry officials — devices that had accidentally fallen into the River Danube during a ministry boating trip. Ott reportedly copied their contents and passed them on to Moscow. He also allegedly handed Russian agents a laptop containing secret EU electronic security hardware and gathered data on Russians who had fled their homeland, including a former intelligence official who had fallen out of favour with President Vladimir Putin, enabling the FSB — Russia's federal security service — to locate them.
Ott's link to Moscow ran largely through Jan Marsalek, a fellow Austrian citizen and former chief operating officer of Wirecard, a German payments company that collapsed in 2020 amid a billion-euro fraud scandal. Marsalek is widely believed to be a Russian intelligence asset and is thought to be living in Moscow. He is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice and faces charges of fraud and embezzlement related to the Wirecard collapse. Prosecutors presented extensive chat messages as evidence, exchanged between Marsalek's suspected account and a network of Bulgarian operatives who were convicted in London in 2025 on separate Russian espionage charges. Ott was not named directly in the chats, but prosecutors argued the operations described matched his actions. A police officer who assisted Ott received a suspended sentence of 15 months.
Ott denied all charges, arguing he had been conducting a covert operation in collaboration with a Western intelligence service — a defence the court rejected. Prosecutors said he was motivated not by ideology but by financial gain and workplace frustration, reportedly receiving around €20,000 for one transaction alone. Investigations into Ott are continuing, as authorities suspect he may also have accessed the personal data of tens of thousands of interior ministry employees.
The verdict has renewed scrutiny of Vienna's long-standing reputation as Europe's espionage capital — a status rooted in Austria's Cold War neutrality, which allowed intelligence services from both East and West to operate relatively freely there. Today, Russia maintains one of its largest diplomatic missions in Europe in Vienna, with around 220 accredited staff. Crucially, Austrian law currently criminalises only espionage directed against the Austrian state itself, meaning spying against foreign countries or the many international organisations headquartered in Vienna — including the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe — is not explicitly prohibited. Austria's government has indicated plans to broaden the legal definition, extending it to cover espionage targeting the EU, international organisations, and the recruitment of agents for foreign intelligence services.