Hungarian national airline Malév collapses into insolvency, ceases all flights (updated)
July 28th, 2010

Commissioner accuses former PMs with perjury

By MTI

The prime minister’s commissioner in charge of investigating the suspected illegal privatisation of state-owned land under the previous governments has accused former prime ministers Gordon Bajnai and Ferenc Gyurcsany of misleading the public prosecutor during questioning about the project, which is believed to have caused major losses to the state.

The two former prime ministers issued statements on Wednesday via their offices rejecting the charges.

Gyula Budai, the commissioner appointed by Viktor Orban, head of the Fidesz centre-right government, said he had acquired several letters from the correspondence between the former heads of government and the project’s Israeli investor, as well as the minutes of a government session from May 2008 which pointed to wrongdoing.

The issue at stake is a tract of land near the village of Sukoro, next to Lake Velence, in central Hungary which was sold for a planned large casino development.

The documents, he insisted, proved that Bajnai and Gyurcsany “bore false witness” during their interviews with the prosecutor, Budai said.

Bajnai’s statement said that Budai had falsely accused both ex-prime ministers, and that Bajnai himself had cooperated with the prosecutor and replied to every question with appended witness statements.

Bajnai’s statement said that the one-billion-dollar planned investment would have served local tourism and created 3,000 jobs around the lake. He added that, as prime minister, he initiated an investigation in connection with an exchange of land which was part of the deal.

Gyurcsany’s secretariat told MTI that he flatly rejected the charges, without giving any further comment.

Topics
Share
Comments
The All Hungary Media Group is firmly committed to freedom of expression and therefore applies a mostly "hands off" approach to comment moderation. Comments left by readers represent their own views and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or beliefs of the staff, editors or owner of the All Hungary Media Group, who nonetheless reserve the right to remove comments that are off-topic or which moderators consider to constitute "hate speech." Also note that in order to prevent spam we generally close entries off to comments several days after publication.
Note that we will be experimenting with some modifications to the commenting system over the coming days, with the aim of allowing users to post without a CAPTCHA system. For the time being you should be able to post comments without putting in your email address.

3 Comments

  1. justasking says:
    July 28, 2010 at 5:51 pm

    Okay, so they/we now know for sure that perjury was committed as opposed to the gossip that’s been flying around for years that they were lying…so now what’s the plan?
    Are they just going to keep collecting this ‘evidence’ only to place it into a ‘to-do file’, that will be addressed…eventually…if ever?

  2. Ricsi says:
    July 28, 2010 at 7:34 pm

    Those same old ties with ‘isrehell’investors coming to the surface again!

  3. Viking says:
    July 28, 2010 at 11:22 pm

    they/we now know for sure that perjury was committed
    justasking at July 28, 2010 5:51 PM
    —
    I think that would be for a Court of Law to decide, and not a politically appointed “prime minister’s commissioner”, so he should hand over the material to NNI for a proper investigation and possible prosecution
    As happened in the Zuschlag-case before Orban came to power