Translation of "translation of office d'instruction pénale " (French → English) :

Office of the District Examining Magistrates

A private prosecution has been brought against Mr Hans-Peter Martin in the Vienna Regional Criminal Court on 6 June 2007 by Merkur Treuhand Wirtschaftstreuhand- und Steuerberatungs Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung for commercial defamation pursuant to Section 152 of the Austrian Criminal Code on the ground that, both on his website www.hpmartin.net and in APA-OTS press release OTS0189 5 11 0473 NEF0006 in connection with the accusations against him (by the EU anti-fraud authority OLAF) of improper use of the secretarial assistance allowance for staff, he had claimed that it had been established after a comprehensive, detailed investigation that he had in no w ...[+++]ay improperly used EU monies and that fault had been found only with a formal error on the part of his accounts manager at the time, Mr Christoph Matznetter, a tax adviser now State Secretary for Finance in the Austrian Government, who, according to Mr Martin, had incorrectly charged three staff computers and two telephone bills to the secretarial assistance allowance instead of to the office expenses allowance.

In the course of the discussions in the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, some Members asked why the German authorities had not begun a criminal investigation until after Daniel Cohn-Bendit had been charged in September 1998, although under Article 258 of the German Penal Code ‘obstruction of prosecution' is a crime that is prosecuted ‘ex officio’, not an offence prosecuted at the behest of the offended person, and the facts on which the suspicion was based had been known since the 1970s.