The employees were tasked with handling tenders, the ministry said.Continue reading
A head of department at the Ministry of the Prime Minister’s Office has been arrested on suspicion of corruption. According to the prosecutor’s office, the official took bribes to ensure that formerly rejected EU tenders would be granted a ‘favorable review.’ The case is linked to a corruption scandal that emerged last month involving several Finance Ministry employees who are also charged with accepting bribes.
In addition to officials from the Ministry of Finance, a senior official from the Ministry of the Prime Minister’s Office is also a suspect in a bribery case involving two ministries. 24.hu has learned that it is one of the ministry’s senior department heads who has been arrested by the authorities.
According to the prosecution, in exchange for bribes, the Ministry of Finance staff helped the applicants to ensure that their grant applications were successful and that the audits they received were favorable. If this did not work, the prosecution documents say, the head of department at the Prime Minister’s Office came into the picture. His role was to act in return for bribe money in the case of rejected tenders, for which the applicants had submitted a request for review to the Prime Minister’s Office. According to the prosecutor’s office, the head of the department arranged for the objection to be upheld in any case, so that the application for the subsidy could be returned to the system for reconsideration.
According to the prosecutor’s motion, the official even arranged on one occasion for one of the bidding companies to collect in full the more than half a billion forints won as an advance, even though the application had been previously rejected. The official also called on the Finance Ministry’s unaware department head to intervene in the case, and according to investigators falsely claimed that the payment was a request from Deputy State Secretary Zsolt Leveleki.
As 24.hu reported before, at the end of April, it emerged that the Central Investigation Directorate (KNYF) had raided several ministry officials in an investigation into suspected bribery and other offenses.
Almost 150 prosecutors and police officers took part in the coordinated criminal operation organized by the KNYF. Investigators searched several premises and seized more than two hundred million forints in cash from officials. The case was previously reported to involve the Ministry of Finance and the Prime Minister’s Office.
The majority of the seized money – 190 million forints – was found in the possession of a single government adviser, who worked at the Deputy State Secretariat for the Implementation of Economic Development Programs at the Ministry of Finance under Finance Minister Mihály Varga.
24.hu also reported that the case has 20 suspects, five of whom have been arrested.
Featured image: illustration by Zsolt Czeglédi/MTI
