MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th May, 2019) A woman, who appeared on a hidden-camera video featuring Austria's former Vice Chancellor Hanz-Christian Strache, and claimed to be a niece of a Russian oligarch, was actuality a student from Bosnia, the Kronen Zeitung newspaper reported, citing sources.
On Tuesday, Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen dismissed the country's government led by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz amid the scandal involving Kurz's coalition partner, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), whose former leader Strache was shown in a secret video pledging to fix public contracts for a woman posing as a Russian oligarch's niece.
The woman, said to speak four languages, including Russian, is an agriculture student from Bosnia and is the type of women Strache likes, according to publicist Gert Schmidt, who investigated the matter.
The girl, who was selected through the casting, was paid up to 7,000 Euros ($7,800) a day. A villa in Ibiza, where her meeting with Strache took place, has already been used for other secret operations. To let their tongues loose, the Austrian ex-vice chancellor and his assistant were offered alcohol and other substances, Kronen Zeitung said.
According to the newspaper, the provocation against Strache was prepared by a lawyer from Vienna, a detective from Munich, as well as two security experts. The operation could cost up to 400,000 euros.
Apparently, they unsuccessfully tried to sell the video for up to 2 million euros to parties or a large construction company but managed to sell it for 600,000 euros, with some parts of the recording being leaked to Germany's Spiegel and Suddeutsche Zeitung newspapers, Kronen Zeitung reported.
Strache previously said that the woman involved in the scandal was a Russian-speaking Latvian citizen. He described the situation as a trap and "a political assassination."
