Mysterious trips of Viktor Orbán and János Lázár to Switzerland

Today I will have to pull up my socks if I want to give even a semi-coherent summary of the growing scandal surrounding a company called MET Holding A.G. with headquarters in Switzerland. The holding company, established only a couple of years ago, is partially owned by MOL (40%) and partially by Hungarian individuals–people formerly employed by MOL and businessmen with close ties to Viktor Orbán.

First of all, it’s hard to decipher the company’s structure which is, as is often the case with enterprises like MET Holding, extremely complicated. Second, since it is likely that MET Holding, in addition to its regular activities, also serves as a money laundering operation for Fidesz as well as Viktor Orbán and his friends, those involved do everything in their power to conceal the company’s business activities, ownership, financials, and so on.

I should go back a few years to February 2010, only a month before the national election and the birth of the two-thirds majority, when the U.S. Embassy in Budapest compiled a report entitled “Allegations of political corruption surround unbundling law.” From the lengthy report we learn that “it is an open secret in Hungary that MVM and MOL provide significant funding to the two main political parties, with MVM rumored to favor the Socialists and MOL favoring Fidesz.”

MET Group predated this U.S. report. According to its promotional material, it began operating in 2007 “in the natural gas retail and wholesale sector benefiting from the market liberalization starting in 2004.” Currently it is active in wholesale gas trading in the European market as well as in the retail sale of natural gas to industrial customers in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Croatia. Five years later, in 2012 MET Holding was established with the objective of being “a central holding organization to manage and support all the subsidiaries of MET Group.” (If you want to know why MET Holding might have been layered on top of MET Group, I suggest you take a look at “How a Holding Company Works.”)

Shortly after the election in 2010 Orbán promised cheaper energy to consumers. In order to lower prices the state-owned MVM (Magyar Villamossági Művek) was allowed to dip into its gas reserves which it could then replenish with cheaper gas from the open market. MVM could have bought the necessary gas directly from Austria, but instead it purchased gas through MET. According to the figures that are available about the transaction, MVM gained little while MET made about 50 billion forints on the deal.

The owners of MET, in addition to MOL, are István Garancsi, a personal friend of Viktor Orbán and owner of Orbán’s favorite football team, Videoton, and György Nagy, one of the founders of Wallis Asset Management Co., a private equity/venture capital firm. Both men have close ties to Zsolt Hernádi, the beleagured CEO of MOL who is accused of bribery in Croatia, and to Sándor Csányi, his deputy and the CEO of OTP, Hungary’s largest bank. Heading MET Holding is Benjamin Lakatos. He expects sales this year to total some 3.8 billion euros.

Most likely nobody would have cared about this Hungarian company with headquarters in Zug, Switzerland, if Hungary’s prime minister hadn’t been so involved in negotiations with Putin as well as with Russian energy companies, in particular Gazprom and Rossatom, the Russian company that specializes in building nuclear power plants. Rossatom was chosen to construct two extra reactors at the Paks power plant. Given the widespread concern over Viktor Orbán’s dealings with the Russian autocrat, Swiss journalists started probing into this mysterious MET. A  well researched article appeared on November 3 in TagesAnzeiger, which was later reprinted in Basler Zeitung. According to the Swiss paper, MET Power, MET Marketing, MET International, and MET Holding all share the same Zug address. Benjamin Lakatos is the CEO of all of them. Zug, by the way, is about 20 km south of Zurich.

I understand that the company’s management is made up of former MOL employees who know the energy business inside out but who found greater opportunities outside of MOL. Lakatos is very proud of his achievement of building MET Holding in two years from practically nothing to a sizable player in the energy business, though one cannot help but be suspicious of a such a sudden rise in fortune. Moreover, given the cozy relationship in the past between MOL and Fidesz, one wonders what role MET may play in the possibly continued reliance of Fidesz and Viktor Orbán on MOL as a source of illicit money. With István Garancsi’s name in the cast of characters, one becomes doubly suspicious since he is often portrayed in the Hungarian press as Orbán’s front man.

Source: http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch

And now let’s move to more recent events that might have something to do with MET Holding. I’m patching the story together from several sources. You may recall that the editor-in-chief of Origo, an online news portal, was dismissed because one of the reporters of the internet site was too curious about a couple of very expensive trips János Lázár, the most important member of the Orbán government after the prime minister, made to Great Britain and Switzerland. Lázár for a long time resisted revealing any details of these trips but eventually after a court order the prime minister’s office released some information. Among the bits and pieces of information that Origo received, there was one item that might be relevant. Origo was informed that János Lázár during his Swiss trip “held conversations with a German citizen about German-Hungarian and Russian-Hungarian relations.”

More than a year later there was another trip to Switzerland. This time it was a private affair. Viktor Orbán and his wife and János Lázár and his wife spent a weekend in Zurich. First they stopped in Germany to visit a “family friend” and then off they went to Zurich, allegedly to attend a concert given by a children’s choir from the Szekler areas of Romania. Quite a lame excuse for traveling to Zurich because earlier this same group gave three concerts in the Hungarian Parliament in Budapest. There was also a side trip to visit a friend in Germany. Is he perhaps the same man Lázár held talks with in March 2012?

About a week ago Viktor Orbán made another trip to Switzerland. This time the occasion was a family visit (including his wife and their two youngest daughters) with Rachel, who is enrolled in a fancy, expensive hotel management course in Lausanne. Since, again, this was a private visit, the prime minister’s office refused to release any information about the trip. However, thanks to an eagle-eyed person, Orbán was spotted at the  Zurich railroad station having a beer with an unidentified man. Since the Orbáns decided to travel back to Hungary by train, a stopover in Zurich was unavoidable since there is no direct train from Geneva, a forty-minute train ride from Lausanne. But why did he choose to go by train from Lausanne all the way to Budapest, a trip that takes altogether 16 hours and 22 minutes? He said that wanted to spend more time with his children. Well, I could imagine many more pleasant ways of spending time with my family than sitting in a second-class train compartment. Suspicious Hungarians already have their own theory: for one reason or other, Orbán chose to travel by train because there is no inspection of either persons or luggage on trains. I find that difficult to believe. I hope that we are not at a point that the country’s prime minister is carrying millions of euros in his suitcase.

Although one can probably discard such speculation, one should take more seriously the information received by the Demokratikus Koalíció that while in Zurich Orbán met representatives of Credit Suisse and Pictet Bank. Pictet is a private bank which in 2012 was the target of a U.S. probe into the use of foreign banks by wealthy Americans seeking to avoid paying taxes. Pictet specializes in “wealth management.” As for Credit Suisse, which is one of the most powerful banks in the world, it also had its problems with the law. In July 2014 Credit Suisse reported a loss of $779 million because of the settlement of a tax evasion case in the United States. Zsolt Gréczy, the spokesman for DK, emphasized that they are not accusing Orbán of anything; they simply want to know whether he met with representatives of these two banks as the prime minister of Hungary or as a private individual.

All in all, the picture that emerges from the few pieces of information we have is not pretty. Orbán has enough trouble as it is. Tonight another 10,000 people demanded Ildikó Vida’s resignation–and his as well.

Another corruption case and the news of the day

Yesterday I promised to write about another scandalous affair, this time involving a close friend and business partner of Viktor Orbán, István Garancsi. This morning after I read a number of articles on the subject I almost gave up on the idea. The case is so complicated–surely for good reason–that it takes some doing to figure out exactly what happened. Here is what I managed to put together. I’m waiting for more input from readers.

Shortly after Viktor Orbán won the election, companies dealing with distance heating wanted to raise their prices, a move that would not have been popular and something the new government wanted to avoid. So the government instructed the state-owned MVMP Partner Energiakereskedelmi Zrt. to supply gas to these providers from its reserves at a lower rate. In return, the government made sure that MVMP would receive cheaper western gas by way of compensation. In fact, the government bought a great deal more gas than was necessary to replenish the reserves. The extra, which was in fact the bulk of the purchases, was sold by MVMP to a company called MET. It then sold the inexpensive gas at a handsome profit.

MET has its headquarters in Switzerland, but some of its subsidiaries are in Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, and the Cayman Islands. Behind its complex business structure are two Hungarians:  György Nagy and István Garancsai.  György Nagy was the founder of Wallis Rt., an investment company, whose CEO between 2000 and 2006 was Gordon Bajnai. Subsequent to Wallis Nagy was involved in several successful business ventures. István Garancsai is the owner of Viktor Orbán’s favorite soccer team, Videoton. He also owns a small credit union, Duna Takarék, which miraculously was not nationalized when all others were. It turned out that it was Duna Takarék that gave a loan of 600 million forints to Viktor Orbán’s soccer foundation in Felcsút.

These offshore companies got inexpensive gas thanks to the largesse of the Hungarian government. They then sold it at the going market price in Hungary. According to estimates, their profit was 50 billion forints in 2012 alone.

Those of you who are interested in the extremely complicated details should read the two articles published by atlatszo.hu on January 28 and February 3.

Just a taste of the complexity of the businesses involved / Source: atlatszo.hu

And now let’s move on to some important news of the day. Early in the morning it became known that although the Hungarian government claimed that the European Commission supported its agreement with Russia concerning Paks, the claim is not true. Of course, that doesn’t surprise me because members of the Orbán government are not known for their truthfulness. On Monday, for example, Viktor Orbán delivered a twenty-five-minute speech in parliament in which there was not one truthful statement about the real state of affairs. At any event, when the government initially made its claim that the EU was on board with the Paks deal,  HVG was skeptical and inquired from the commissioner for energy about the case. The reporter was told that the commissioner hadn’t received detailed information and that they were waiting until they had it in hand. Today came the news that the European Commission will investigate the case very soon.

And in a blow to the Hungarian government’s tax policy, the European Court of Justice ruled that

Articles 49 TFEU and 54 TFEU must be interpreted as precluding legislation of a Member State relating to tax on the turnover of store retail trade which obliges taxable legal persons constituting, within a group, ‘linked undertakings’ within the meaning of that legislation, to aggregate their turnover for the purpose of the application of a steeply progressive rate, and then to divide the resulting amount of tax among them in proportion to their actual turnover, if – and it is for the referring court to determine whether this is the case – the taxable persons covered by the highest band of the special tax are ‘linked’, in the majority of cases, to companies which have their registered office in another Member State.

To translate this convoluted sentence into plain English, the extra tax that foreign-based retail chains had to pay since 2011 is discriminatory. The judges instructed the Hungarian courts to make a ruling in accordance with EU laws in those cases where foreign companies suffered financial discrimination. Apparently the contested tax revenues amounted to about 90 billion forints. According to legal experts, it is likely that the Hungarian government will end up paying a great deal more compensation to these companies.

As for a resolution on the fate of the “Gabriel” monument, the suspense remains. Tomorrow János Lázár will have a meeting with various Jewish organizations. A leak published by Népszabadság claimed that the erection of the monument has been “postponed,” a statement that was promptly denied by Antal Rogán. Meanwhile one Jewish organization after the other is returning the money received from the government for the events of the Holocaust Memorial Year. In brief, it is a mess. But Viktor Orbán doesn’t like to admit defeat, and therefore there is a good possibility that he will go ahead with the project. Let’s hope that he realizes the gravity of such a decision given the general climate both within and outside Hungary.