Tax fraud whistleblower says Innsbruck prosecutors hid data

Klaus Lins from Feldkirch, Vorarlberg (Western Austria), indirectly passed on documents of tax fugitives to German authorities in 1997. He stated in an interview with the magazine “trend” that the public prosecutor’s office of Innsbruck possibly sheltered these documents.

The public prosecutor’s office of Innsbruck has possibly been sheltering documents about Austrian tax fugitives for decades. They are presumed to have sheltered their assets in funds in Liechtenstein. The business magazine “trend” reported about this today (Mon).

Trustees of these funds are the famous art collector Herbert Batliner. His former IT expert Klaus Lins stole more than 16,000 data sets from Batliner fifteen years ago. These data sets brought the German treasury hundreds of millions of Euros of additional tax money.

Lins, who served a prison sentence of six months, told “trend” about a visit of the senior prosecutor Kurt Spitzer. The German Federal Intelligence Service ordered Mr Spitzer to keep track of the accusations of money laundering and tax evasion in Liechtenstein.

Apparently, Mr Spitzer and civil servants of the Interior Ministry confiscated all documents. Among them are at least three Austrian funds but also many Austrian names in international funds.

Mr Lins does not think that the public prosecutor’s office passed on the data to the finance. He did not want to specify which names were mentioned.