BRUSSELS — Top officials in the government of former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán should be investigated over billions of euros in missing EU funds, the country’s anti-corruption watchdog told POLITICO.
The call to retrieve the missing money comes as Orbán’s successor, Péter Magyar, tries to convince Brussels that the country is ready to receive more than €10 billion in EU cash frozen due to rule-of-law concerns.
Ferenc Pál Biró, the president of the Hungarian Integrity Authority, said “high-level politicians can and may well be prosecuted” over their involvement in an alleged scheme to systematically defraud European taxpayers during Orbán’s 16-year rule.
He said his team has “identified a number of criminal cases where I personally believe that we should be as a country … in a position to recover those funds and have those funds repatriated, because most of these have already left the country,” Biró said. He did not make specific allegations against Orbán or other members of his inner circle. Orbán and his Fidesz party did not respond to requests for comment.
The Hungarian Integrity Authority, which was founded in 2022 as part of reforms pushed by Brussels, monitors the spending and security of EU funds. It is independent of the government and will likely be responsible for helping dismantle the crony networks created during the Orbán years that stretch across everything from construction to utilities and the media. Biró has been in charge of the watchdog since it was launched.
According to the watchdog, three companies were awarded a majority of government contracts to provide goods and services, with the amount charged for these contracts artificially inflated. Biró said the government spent around €10 billion with these three firms over the past four years. He did not name the companies involved.
“The overpricing, what we believe to be subject to corruption risk … would be €3.5 billion,” he said, adding that the public procurement tenders were “manipulated” and basic items were charged at several times the market rate. Under the previous government, the Hungarian state “became the largest entity on the market,” he said.
Magyar, who was sworn into office in May following a landslide election victory a month earlier, has repeatedly accused his predecessor of corruption.
The Hungarian government did not respond to requests for comment.
Last month Magyar met with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels. After the meeting he said they had agreed to “unlock” as much as €16.4 billion in funds that had been withheld from Budapest over breaches of its obligations under EU law.
However, Magyar’s government will still have to submit a convincing plan on how it intends to carry out critical reforms and allocate the money before the end of August, or risk losing the funding altogether.
According to Biró, Hungary has been “lagging behind substantially” when it comes to control over how those funds are spent and monitored.
Biró said that under the previous government he was subjected to politically motivated attacks — as well as being the target of attempted bribes — while trying to probe the public procurement scheme. Biró said his wife had been offered a job — he refused to say by whom — which involved high pay for no work; he was also detained and accused of having used his company car inappropriately.
The new administration, Biró said, should move to address these allegations of corruption and intimidation as soon as possible, including by investigating those responsible for alleged irregularities.
“One of the key mandates that the incoming government is built on, that this landslide victory is built on, is fighting corruption and recovering funds,” Biró said. “Justice should be done and people should get back what was stolen from them.”
‘Zero tolerance’
Commenting on the allegations, a European Commission spokesperson said there is “zero tolerance for fraud against the EU budget.”
“Member States are first in line to prevent, detect and deal effectively with any irregularities, including fraud, relating to EU funding which they implement, such as cohesion funds,” the spokesperson added. If EU investigators and prosecutors detect irregularities, “the Commission will follow up with Member States to ensure that any misappropriated EU funding is recovered from beneficiaries.”
Biró said the Magyar government has yet to approach the authority and set out how it wants to work with the watchdog, but that they are ready to share what they know.
“We have a wealth of information, and we have uncovered a number of cases,” he said, “depending on how the inter-institutional cooperation will be established, and what will be the role of the asset recovery agency; either we can do it ourselves, or we can pass this information on to the respective bodies.”
The National Office for Asset Recovery is a new body that Magyar promised to set up to investigate the misappropriation of public assets.
Magyar last month announced that his government will join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, something Orbán had refused to do. The EPPO has the power to investigate and prosecute crimes involving the EU budget, such as fraud and corruption.