Mr Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of Austria’s right-wing populist Freedom Party (FPO), met an attractive Russian multimillionaire in Ibiza on July 24, 2017. She offered him campaign support in exchange for public contracts.

What he did not know was that the entire exchange had been staged and was being recorded by hidden cameras.

It is still not known who was behind it, but the video was created three months before Austria’s general election that October. Following the election, Mr Strache would rise to become the country’s vice-chancellor.

The video shows Mr Strache and fellow party member Johann Gudenus, at the time the deputy mayor of Vienna, meeting a woman in a luxurious holiday villa on the Spanish island of Ibiza.

She was introduced to them as Alyona Makarova, the purported niece of Mr Igor Makarov, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin. She apparently could conduct business practically anywhere she wanted with her “Latvian” passport.

The supposed investor, who offered to put a hundred million euros into their partnership, already had a plan.

She proposed acquiring a 50 per cent stake in a highly influential Austrian tabloid, the Kronen Zeitung, and using it as a mouthpiece to back Mr Strache and his party in the election campaign.

Mr Strache, dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans, seemed enthusiastic – mostly about the proposal, but also about the woman herself. “Are you kidding? She’s hot,” he said with a Viennese lilt.

For more than six hours, he spoke to the Russian, alternately whispering and roaring, lecturing and gesticulating.

“As long as I’m not dead, I’ll be in charge for the next 20 years,” he said at one point.

Ultimately, a deal took shape in that room in the Ibiza villa on that July day in 2017: Russian money of uncertain origin would help boost the FPO’s election results.

And it went without saying that the woman who said she was Alyona Makarova would also get something out of it.

That night, switching between Russian and English, she repeatedly asked what she would get in return after the election if, as planned, Mr Strache were to become part of the government.

The woman had a confidant at her side at the villa, a middle-aged man in white trousers and a blue shirt who did most of the talking when it came to the sensitive negotiations. He demanded, in German, that they be granted the kind of blatant financial advantages that only a government can provide.

But Mr Strache, who is fond of presenting himself as the man cleaning up Austrian politics, did not stand up and leave as one might have expected him to do in such a situation.

Instead, though repeatedly emphasising during the conversation that he was available only for legal deals, he readily agreed to proposals that, if implemented, would clearly be illegal.

The matters discussed included the question of whether the FPO, if it became part of a coalition government, would be in a position to award artificially inflated government contracts to the purported Russian.

They also talked about the possibility of the Russian woman making a donation to the FPO that could be concealed by way of an association.

BEHIND THE STORY

The meeting in Ibiza appears to have served the sole purpose of deceiving Mr Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of Austria’s right-wing populist Freedom Party, and fellow party member Johann Gudenus in a professionally staged and technically elaborate spectacle. Hidden cameras and microphones were installed in the villa in light switches and in a mobile-phone charging station. The microphones recorded almost every word spoken. The Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and Der Spiegel magazine both obtained parts of the video and audio recordings and analysed them together. However, the newspaper paid no money for the material, and neither did Der Spiegel, according to the magazine.

To determine the veracity of the video, Suddeutsche Zeitung obtained photos of an invoice showing that the villa was booked from July 22 to 25, 2017. An expert hired by the Suddeutsche Zeitung confirmed that the photos advertising the villa on the booking website show the same rooms that can be seen in the hours of video footage. Hidden cameras and microphones recorded their conversations.

The Russian woman’s apparent confidant said her money was not “actually entirely legal” and described the deal as “legally tricky”.

And still, that did not prompt Mr Strache and Mr Gudenus to leave.

The confidant said the Russian woman’s dealings were in “an illegal space”. Mr Strache and Mr Gudenus remained seated.

The full length of the meeting is documented in the video, sober viewing that raises deep moral questions, over more than six hours which covered not only backroom deals, but also the overarching goal of creating a tamed Austrian media landscape similar to the Hungarian model.

Did Mr Strache or Mr Gudenus report to the authorities the next day that someone had attempted to bribe them? Or that illicit money was to be smuggled into Austria?

Requests for responses to those questions sent by Suddeutsche Zeitung and news weekly Der Spiegel were left unanswered.

In a message to Suddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegel, Mr Strache and Mr Gudenus did not deny having been in that villa, but said it was a “strictly private meeting”.

Ibiza, an oligarch’s niece, millions and millions of euros and a major newspaper?

Even by the standards of Austrian politics – which has a penchant for absurdist drama – it was an audacious scenario. Too audacious to be real, in fact.

Mr Strache and Mr Gudenus, it turned out, had been lured into a trap. Someone had wanted to put to the test how they would react to such a tempting offer.

The purported Russian was not the niece of oligarch Makarov, who is actually a real person. Nor is it likely that she had hundreds of millions of euros at her disposal. She was simply acting as a decoy.

Neither Der Spiegel nor the Suddeutsche Zeitung has any reliable information about the motives of the people who set Mr Strache this trap in 2017 or who they might have been working for.

But one thing was clear following the evaluation of the material and verification of its authenticity by two experts: It was in the public interest to know how two such high-ranking representatives of the Austrian government and of their party responded to dubious advances from a purported oligarch.

• This story was originally published on May 17.

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