(Bloomberg) -- Insolvent tycoon Rene Benko remains free to defend himself against multiple international criminal investigations after Austrian authorities said they couldn’t comply with an Italian arrest warrant.
Austrian officials had questioned the founder of the Signa retail and property conglomerate, and released him under investigation, a spokesman for the Innsbruck prosecutors said by email. With several parallel investigations, Austrian authorities cannot comply with a European arrest warrant, he said, adding that Benko wasn’t required to post bail.
The statement came in response to reports that Italian prosecutors had sought to detain Benko as part of a wide-ranging corruption investigation. Benko has come under legal scrutiny in several nations following the financial meltdown of his company last year.
Austrian prosecutors raided Benko’s home in Innsbruck and his company’s headquarters earlier this year, investigating suspected embezzlement, fraud and fraudulent bankruptcy. Prosecutors in Liechtenstein and Munich are probing allegations of money laundering and fraud.
“Benko will continue to fully cooperate with all national and international authorities, as he has done in the past,” Norbert Wess, a lawyer for Benko said in response to a request for comment. Benko is “confident that any allegations against him can be resolved with the content being found to be incorrect.”
Benko’s group included trophy assets such as the Chrysler Building in New York, a stake in department store Selfridges, and a luxury hotel in Venice. Signa was also developing a real estate project in Bozen, the largest town in the German-speaking area of Italy.
Signa collapsed at the end of last year due to rising interest rates and the subsequent decline in the value of its assets.
Italian police detained several people on Tuesday suspected of trying to sway public officials in Trentino-Südtirol, an Italian region bordering Austria, prosecutors said in a statement without mentioning Benko by name. Nine people, including a mayor and three entrepreneurs, are under house arrest.
Prosecutors had issued an arrest warrant against Benko as part of the action, the Ansa news service said, citing judicial sources it didn’t identify.
Benko was handed a suspended jail sentence in 2012 for asking a Croatian politician to help smooth over a tax investigation. That verdict prompted the businessman to formally resign from all manager positions at his companies, shifting to an advisory role.
--With assistance from Alberto Brambilla.
(Updates with statement from Austrian prosecutors from first paragraph.)
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