The Vienna Public Prosecutor’s Office has brought charges against a former Austrian domestic intelligence official who was arrested in March on suspicion of spying for Russia but was later released.

Egisto Ott, a former employee of the now-defunct Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism (BVT), stands accused of abuse of office and faces up to three years in prison.

According to the court indictment, Ott, who was working as a police officer in 2019 after his dismissal from the BVT, instructed another official to gather information about participants in a meeting of European intelligence and security services. Specifically, he allegedly sought to identify which former BVT employees were in attendance. In doing so, Ott is said to have acted on the orders of former Freedom Party (FPÖ) politician Hans-Jörg Jenewein, who has also been charged.

The names of the BVT employees were reportedly passed on to Jenewein in May 2019. Prosecutors argue that this “endangered the maintenance of public national security and the success of future intelligence activities.”

Ott is further accused of instructing a police officer to collect the names of officers investigating the so-called Ibiza-gate scandal, which led to the collapse of Austria’s coalition government between the People’s Party and the FPÖ.

Ott was first suspected of leaking secrets to the Russians in 2017 and was arrested in 2021, with another arrest following in late March this year. He is also believed to have passed sensitive information to another Austrian, Jan Marsalek, a former senior manager at the collapsed German payment processing giant, Wirecard, who is now allegedly in hiding in Russia.

The Austrian government has called for tighter controls on espionage after Ott’s arrest was made public.