The Salzburg festival saga… no end in sight
After the technical director, Klaus Kretschmer, was found mangled under a bridge just outside of Salzburg in a failed suicide attempt, even more attention has been focused on the yearly Salzburg Easter Festival, founded by Karajan in 1967. Klaus Kretschmer was relieved earlier of his duties when it seemed he was connected with the festival executive director’s, Michael Dewitte, ongoing fraud.
Michael Dewitte on the other hand was relieved of his duties in December, after being exposed of regularly diverting 5% of the sponsor’s funds to a secret bank account (approximately €2 million/$ 2.8 million according to Audit Services Austria). The executive director also transfered a €300,000 part of a festival donation to a non-existent Carribean based company with a northern Cyprus bank account. Michael Dewitte fled to his Belgian homeland in an attempt to avoid Austrian law. Exactly the extent of damages might never be known. Perks such as Dewitte’s wife on the payroll, or that €585 could even be claimed for a taxi cab ride from Salzburg to it’s airport, are hard to factor in. In a Der Standard article today a list of some of the most embarrassing findings are:
- Dewitte’s wife hired “without a job description” earned €6,000 in 2006, rose to €43.673 in 2009.
- 17.983 tickets sold in 2001 sank to 14.186, yet tickets given away went from 728 to 3.307 in 2001, in 2006 free tickets rose to 6,350
- Dewitte’s salary rose from €133.834 in 2001 to €233.677 in 2009
- travel/board costs rose from €33.000 to €91.000 in 2009
Eight other names have since been released in involvement with the embezzlement among Michael Dewitte and Klaus Kretschmer, according to Gabi Burgstaller, president of the festival and governor of the state of Salzburg. However, Burgstaller’s haste for the spotlight may be her undoing as more questions surface as to why she was unaware about the financials for so many years. In the meantime everyone is quickly washing their hands of the affair. The festival’s two auditing firms have each backpedaled their way out, one claiming it was only responsible for compiling annual reports and not detailed audits, the other stated it only audited the annual reports not the books themselves.
The festival runs from March 27th to April 5th, and will feature Richard Wagner’s “Goetterdaemmerung,” conducted by Sir Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic.
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