GOOD MORNING – G´scheiter afterwards | collective inability

“You’re always smarter afterwards” – one of the dumbest sayings. First of all, afterwards you are by no means always smarter. Second, it serves as the cheapest excuse for mistakes – because who could have predicted that this would happen. For example, with Austria’s total delivery to Putin’s Russia for gas deliveries. According to the weak defense, who could have expected that Putin would ever blackmail his gas buyers? In fact, many leaders in Austria did not want to see any risk. Quite the contrary: They tied themselves much more closely to Russia – with a non-cancellable supply and, above all, purchase contract until 2040. And anyone who warned of this dependency and one-sidedness was ignored – like the then OMV boss Gerhard Roiss, who in 2015 had to give way to the German intimate friend Rainer Seele. Roiss was invited to the ÖVP corruption committee yesterday, where he willingly provided information. For example, about how the then ÖIAG boss Siegfried Wolf, who was himself intensively involved in Russia, explained to him that his course of orienting himself more towards Norway than Russia was wrong. He would also never have signed a gag contract with Gazprom, like the one concluded by his successor Seele. Of course, Roiss wasn’t the only one who warned, others also failed early on and failed beforehand. But Russia and Putin skeptics were never really in demand in Austria. Some say: Not even today.