Photo: Unsplash A former employee of Atomic Skis has been sentenced to 14 months of suspended imprisonment and ordered to pay €80,000 ($88,317) to the company for stealing and reselling more than 2,600 pairs of skis. News of the case first broke last August when the man was accused of stealing around 1,900 pairs of […]
Photo: Unsplash
A former employee of Atomic Skis has been sentenced to 14 months of suspended imprisonment and ordered to pay €80,000 ($88,317) to the company for stealing and reselling more than 2,600 pairs of skis. News of the case first broke last August when the man was accused of stealing around 1,900 pairs of skis from his employer and selling them privately at just €50 per pair ($55). As an employee of the company, his job was to take skis that had a range of minor defects and dispose of them. Instead, he worked with an accomplice to resell them for his own profit privately in Austria.
The illegal operation took place starting in 2021 and a raid of the employee’s home uncovered 300 pairs of skis in 2023. Salzburg Nachrichten reports that “several of the first defendant’s nightly ski loading activities were also documented on company internal video recordings,” which led to Atomic claiming 1,909 pairs of skis had been stolen. A second defendant in the case was then accused of buying many of those skis in bulk and reselling them for around €74 per pair.
The second defendant’s involvement accounted for 600 pairs of skis. While he claimed he was unaware that the skis were stolen, the former Atomic employee claimed otherwise. Both men claimed they received a lower average amount of money per pair of ski that was resold, and the second defendant was also found guilty. He was convicted of concealment and sentenced to eight months of conditional detention.
“I usually asked for significantly less than 50 euros and also received less,” said the first defendant, according to Salzburg Nachrichten “He knew that I worked for Atomic. And I also told him that I had taken the skis.”
The Austrian newspaper says presiding Judge Markus Hanl then asked: “By ‘took them,’ do you mean ‘stole them?’ to which the defendant answered, ‘Yes.’”
