Valyi-Nagy described weekly meetings in Parliament with the then-prime minister and state secretaries to resolve problematic cases and make key economic decisions.

Topics included municipal public lighting tenders, "in which Elios regularly won", with Janos Lazar, who in that period worked as Fidesz's parliamentary group leader and later as a state secretary of the cabinet office, tasked with ensuring progress. Problems were addressed immediately, Valyi-Nagy noted.

The former state secretary said an increasing number of cases had been "totally unprofessional and a complete waste of money", benefiting only the companies implementing the projects while burdening the Hungarian state. "The ratio was changing: the proportion of bad projects was rising, while good ones were declining," he added.

He cited a government data centre planned in God, near Budapest, where 15 billion forints (EUR 41.1m) were spent "with nothing to show for it but a concrete sarcophagus". "It was outright theft, and to this day, no one has been held accountable, no investigation has been launched, and no report has been filed," he said.

Valyi-Nagy also discussed the repurchase of Antenna Hungaria in the early 2010s, which had been privatised under former PM Ferenc Gyurcsany.

The purchase price was negotiated down from 61-62 billion forints to 48 billion, but when he informed Orban, the prime minister insisted on raising it to 53 billion. "I froze, as anyone would have in that situation. On the one hand, I didn't understand it; on the other, I understood all too well what this was about," he said.

He criticised the centralisation of state IT procurements, which were funneled through a few companies tied to a single ministry, creating a system where problems "never reached the top". The e-real estate system, contracted around 2016, he said, still did not work properly, while live contracts for digital citizenship exceed 100 billion forints, "despite the fact that these could have been delivered at a tenth of the cost with higher professional standards".

The number of such contracts kept growing, with market companies often deciding what developments the state should pursue, Valyi said. "There was always someone, around 2016-2017, who took control of the market, deciding who could join the framework agreements, who would lead the consortium, and who should 'get lost'," he added.

Valyi-Nagy described the system as a hybrid one where "even the actual owners of NER [system of national cooperation] oligarchs were sometimes defrauded by the oligarchs themselves, and the oligarchs were defrauded by their own mid-level managers."

"In the end, everyone was defrauding everyone, which is why the bill for the Hungarian state ended up being so high," he said.

He also said that tax and customs authority NAV had thoroughly investigated and gathered information on everyone involved, conducting raids before politics intervened.

Weeks later, the government raided the NAV leadership, sidelining dozens of people working on the case and handing it over to a rural investigative office with just 4-6 staff. "The previous 100-120 people working on the case were out, and a fresh team of 4-6 had to start from scratch," he said.

There were hundreds of cases where NAV, the police, and the prosecutor's office were tasked with burying these matters, he added.

Regarding state IT procurements, Valyi-Nagy said network service contracts and equipment procurements were significantly overpriced, and the licensing contracts also "cry out for investigation".


Source: MTI – Hungary’s national news agency since 1881.

Photo: youtube screenshot

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