Klagenfurt Airport: Sixth suspect in Lilihill case – expert report in focus
Klagenfurt public prosecutors have widened their investigation into the Lilihill business group. A university professor is suspected of having produced a "favour opinion".
Investigation in Lilihill case: university professor as sixth suspect
Klagenfurt public prosecutors have widened their investigation surrounding the Lilihill business group and Klagenfurt Airport. According to the Kleine Zeitung, a university professor has now been brought into the proceedings as the sixth suspect – a man who was never part of the Lilihill group.
In spring 2022, the professor prepared an expert report on the so-called call option, by which the State of Carinthia and the City of Klagenfurt could reclaim their stakes in the airport. The opinion described this step as a "legal and financial worst-case scenario" for the public sector. The client was airport company KFBG, which paid the professor 29,400 euros for this.
Investigators are now examining whether this was a "favour opinion" – that is, an expert report deliberately tailored to the interests of Lilihill, the airport's majority owner at the time, but billed to the airport.
The basis of the suspicion is email correspondence between the professor and the then-KFBG managing director, appointed by Lilihill. Messages from March 2022 were first published by the portal "Mediapartizan". In them, the professor writes that the expert report should appear "hopefully reasonably objective" to outsiders. At the same time, he explains that he had tried to argue Lilihill's position "as convincingly as possible" and to present those of the city and state "as uncertain".
The business group of founder and sole owner Franz Peter Orasch was majority shareholder of Klagenfurt Airport from 2018 to 2023. For one and a half years, prosecutors have been investigating the Lilihill era – conducting house searches at six addresses in Austria and Germany and securing several terabytes of data. So far, five persons have been listed as suspects, including Orasch himself.
The call option was eventually exercised in 2023. This renationalisation formed the basis for an examination by the State Court of Audit, which in February 2025 presented a detailed list of failings and mismanagement and called on prosecutors to investigate. Since then, there has been suspicion of breach of trust.
The estimated damage currently amounts to around 500,000 euros. "The evaluation of the data, which is essential for further investigations, is being handled by the State Criminal Office and will unfortunately take time," says Markus Kitz, spokesman for Klagenfurt public prosecutors.
An enquiry from the Kleine Zeitung to the professor went unanswered. All suspects are presumed innocent.
Source: Kleine Zeitung