An Austrian spy with suspected links to a fugitive former executive has been arrested on suspicion of selling confidential information to Russia, after a British tip-off.
Egisto Ott was arrested on Friday, accused of cloning the phones of senior interior ministry figures and transferring sensitive data to people linked to Russian intelligence.
The three smartphones had been handed to another Austrian agent, who has also been arrested, for water damage repair, when the senior advisers to whom they belonged capsized on a departmental canoeing trip in the summer of 2017.
The phones were cloned and their information passed to Ott, a former agent of Austria’s now-dissolved security service the Office of Constitutional Protection. He sold the information to Martin Weiss, a former department head of the same agency.
Weiss, in turn, is believed to have been on the payroll of Jan Marsalek, the disgraced former head of collapsed German payment firm Wirecard, Austrian broadsheet Der Standard reports.