A few weeks ago the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, the central bank of Austria had issued a positive outlook for the future and declared the emergency economic measures put in place to deal with the coronavirus crisis a success, although a full recovery will still take a number of years.
So despite the hard times things are looking relatively good. That is, until SV Mattersburg and Commerzialbank president Martin Pucher arrives on the scene with a scandal that has sent shockwaves and reverberations across Austria.
A web of fraud spanning over two decades has seen balance sheets invented and over 700 million euros seeped away and filtered out of the bank, and with only 10 percent or so accounted for, the search is on to find who benefited and where the money went. Pucher insists that it wasn’t to line his own pockets, that he is extremely sorry, and the twenty years of contrived deceit was only to cover previous pecuniary deficits and things just got out of control. Whether the Austrian federal investigators believe that or not, is another matter.
Some people and even ex players have found it difficult to believe that such a lovely bloke could be the mastermind of such a vast and enormous fraud and even suggested that perhaps Pucher could have been exploited by others.
Austrian People’s Party leader Christian Sagartz said "For me it is incomprehensible how someone could have done this mischief for years” and demanded to know “Which clubs and structures have benefited from this self-service shop? Who was the network around Martin Pucher?”
Meanwhile SV Mattersburg, the club which Pucher became president of in 1988 and boosted from the lower echelons of the 5th tier to the Austrian Bundesliga, has filed for bankruptcy. Pucher claims about 8-12% of the missing money has been invested into the football team. A new club, MSV 2020 has already been formed and the Mayor has already declared his intention to purchase the club stadium
Questions will be raised at how such a scheme could have gone on for so long without being detected by auditors, regulators, or board members for over 20 years. Investigations are still ongoing, with the latest news being that a Vienna law firm plans to sue the Austrian government on behalf of the Commerzialbank creditors that have lost their funds.
There have also been reports that 8-10 million euros were moved out from Commerzialbank in the week before the bankruptcy.
Two questions that the Austiran investigators will be asking will be who knew? And where did all this money go? 10% into SV Mattersburg still leaves well over 600 million euros nowhere to be seen and not accounted for. Also oddly, other than the Bloomberg article linked to in this piece, I haven’t seen this story reported or followed anywhere in the English speaking media which is strange as it is one of the biggest cases of fraud in European history that I can remember.
In 2005 Martin Pucher sacked Jabu Pule, a talented but troubled South African midfielder who failed to live up to his potential. After a string of disciplinary incidents, the last straw saw him being arrested for drink driving in which Pule’s car was seen rolling off the motorway. Martin Pucher had seen enough.
He stated "If your car rolls off the highway and you fall asleep because you're so drunk, football is the least of your worries."
Now in a bizarre twist of fate, Martin Pucher’s Commerzialbank has quite literally “rolled off the highway” and with 700 million euros missing, a raft of angry defrauded creditors, football it seems, is now the least of his worries.
