The Court of Auditors (RH) published today for the first time party donations according to the transparency rules that have been tightened since the beginning of the year. What is new is that the parties have to send their donation lists to the RH four times a year, which then discloses donations of 500 euros or more on its homepage. For the SPÖ and the Greens, this first quarterly report has now been made: According to this, the SPÖ has received 6,122 euros so far, the Greens 5,230 euros. According to APA, the other parties are still missing.
While the quarterly reports are intended to ensure that smaller donations are disclosed quickly, large donations must still be disclosed immediately. The ÖVP and the Greens lowered the limit for this from 2,645 to 2,500 euros with the reform of the party law. This year, however, no party has reported a major donation. The quarterly accounts of the other parties must be available by the end of next week at the latest.
The largest single donation reported this year went in February from the Green faction in the Tyrolean Chamber of Labor to the Green student organization GRAS (EUR 2,500), which also received EUR 1,000 from Innsbruck Mayor Georg Willi. The SPÖ also made two donations of 1,000 euros each to the student organization VSSTÖ in connection with the current ÖH election campaign, including one from ex-transport minister Rudolf Streicher.
No donation over 2,500 euros yet
No party has published donations of more than 2,500 euros this year. In the previous year, a total of 116,148 euros was collected, of which 47,835 euros came from the SPÖ and 28,442 euros from NEOS. The ÖVP – a few years ago it was criticized for making large donations amounting to hundreds of thousands of euros – now only appears in the donation lists under “also ran”.
In the previous year, the ÖVP only appeared on the RH homepage with 4,000 euros. Since July 2019, parties have only been allowed to collect a total of 750,000 euros in donations per year, and a maximum of 7,500 euros per year from individual donors.
