According to the prosecutor, the Budapest court that acquitted a former ambassador and other suspects of charges of misappropriation and forgery last year, had “wrongly evaluated the evidence and failed to reveal all circumstances” of the 2008 transaction, the paper said.

The Hungarian state suffered losses of several billion forints through the deal, the paper said, citing information from the prosecutor’s office, and suggested that Árpád Székely, Hungary’s ambassador to Russia at the time, was guilty of misappropriating public funds.

The government control office filed charges against Székely and six others in 2011, saying that procedural violations had been committed in the course of selling Hungary’s trade representation building in Moscow, which had started back in 2005 under the Socialist government.

Republished with permission of Hungary Matters, MTI’s daily newsletter.