The Socialist opposition said clients of brokerages affected by the scandal should be fully compensated and the people responsible for the losses should publicly declare their personal assets.

Zsolt Molnár, the Socialist head of Parliament’s national security committee, requested urgent information from authorities regarding national security risks related to brokerage firms facing bankruptcy.

Ruling Fidesz said Hungary’s left-wing parties represented the interests of the fraudster brokerage firms. Referring to the scandals at Buda-Cash and Quaestor, the party’s parliamentary group said it was senseless for the Socialists to try to deny responsibility, since under their government nothing had been done to prevent the decade-long financial corruption and they made appointments to these firms, too.

Fidesz expects people who run these companies to be held responsible and their personal assets freed up to compensate clients who suffered losses.

Bence Tuzson, spokesman for Fidesz’s parliamentary group, called the Quaestor affair “another Socialist broker scandal” and pledged his party’s protection for all those “that have investment in Hungary”.

Radical nationalist Jobbik said blame for the brokerage scandal could be laid at the feet of both the ruling Fidesz party and its governing predecessor, the Socialists.

The Democratic Coalition demanded that parliament establish a committee to examine the “scandal of the decade” in an impartial way.

The Quaestor brokerage case was the biggest brokerage scandal in Hungary in the past 25 years and “it demonstrates the nature of the Orbán regime,” the Együtt party said.

“Oligarchs close to Fidesz” stole 150 billion forints (EUR 490m) from ordinary people and now “have the cheek” to turn to the state for help and get taxpayers to rescue them, an official of the party said.

The Dialogue for Hungary (PM) party said it would be difficult to deny that the Quaestor case is Fidesz’s scandal.

The party’s economic spokesman Zsolt Szabó said that central bank governor György Matolcsy owed an explanation because the financial supervisory system developed under his leadership had failed.

Source www.hungarymatters.hu

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MTI photo: Kovács Tamás