Austrian paper Wiener Zeitung stated last week that the evidence presented showed that Jansa was persuaded to find a Slovenian partner for Patria and guaranteed that the defence tender for 135 armoured personnel carriers (APCs) would be rigged to favour Patria over rival Steyr-Daimler-Puch, a US-Austrian concern.

According to the indictment, Patria spent EUR 900,000 on middlemen to secure the deal, with Dnevnik reporting that the spokesman for the Vienna prosecution Thomas Vecsey, a prosecutor himself, confirmed that the Austrian prosecution was convinced that Riedl bribed Jansa. The prosecution based its view on results of a joint investigation by Slovenian, Finnish and Austrian investigators.

The Wiener Zeitung said the indictment was filed in June. The five men are charged with bribery, industrial espionage to the benefit of a foreign country, racketeering, attempted grand fraud and corporate tax evasion.

Apart from arms dealer Riedl, Austrian-Slovenian businessman Walter Wolf is also among the suspects. The trial in Vienna is expected to start in autumn, simultaneously with a Patria corruption trial in Slovenia that will see Jansa and Wolf as defendants alongside three other suspects.

Slovenian commercial broadcaster POP meanwhile reported today that Austrian prosecutors denied having charged Riedl with giving a bribe to Jansa. Vecsey explained that it was already a criminal act to offer a bribe.

Jansa's party, the opposition Democrats (SDS), also dismissed the accusations for Dnevnik. Using the wording of the indictment in Slovenia, the SDS said Jansa supposed to received a bribe "at an unknown place, at an unknown location, at an unknown time?".

The SDS added that the finding that no bribe had reached Jansa only "confirms our conviction that this is about heating up old stories without proof for the needs of daily politics".

The defence attorneys of both Riedl and Wolf refuted the charges of the Vienna prosecution for the Wiener Zeitung as well.

Riedl's attorney Ruediger Schender said the charges would vanish into thin air, as there was no evidence to support them. Wolf's attorney Markus Singer finds that the charges are based only on speculations, adding that Wolf, as a middleman, had simply been forming business contacts and was not present at any detailed negotiations.

Among the other five men, a former employee of Steyr-Daimler-Puch is charged with leaking internal documents of the company, according to the Wiener Zeitung. It is not clear what the other two men are charged with.

Based on industrial espionage charges, the Vienna prosecution wants the state of Austria to confiscate EUR 3.5m from Riedl and EUR 2.3m from Wolf.

In Slovenia, Jansa and Wolf are charged alongside three other men with either offering or receiving a bribe. Jansa and two of his alleged close associates, Joze Zagozen and Tone Krkovic, are suspected of having received a bribe, while Wolf and Ivan Crnkovic, the boss of Rotis, the Slovenian company selected to supply the APCs from Patria, are suspected of offering a bribe.