The good name of Sándor Pintér, minister of the interior

Two days ago a lengthy interview appeared in Magyar Nemzet with Sándor Pintér, Viktor Orbán’s “perpetual” minister of the interior. He was named interior minister in 1998, in 2010, and in 2014. Why is Sándor Pintér so indispensable to Viktor Orbán? It’s become almost a commonplace in Hungary to say that “if Viktor Orbán could relieve Sándor Pintér he wouldn’t have appointed him in the first place.” I guess one doesn’t need too fertile an imagination to guess what these wagging tongues have in mind.

Pintér’s past is full of question marks. In October 2013 I wrote a post on Pintér, “Possible criminal activities of some Hungarian politicians?” In it I gave a fairly detailed description of Pintér’s ties to members of the Budapest underworld while he was chief of the Hungarian national police force. In fact, he might have been involved in the so-called “mafia war” that began in 1996 with the murder of a crime family member and continued a few days later with the murder of the driver of his race horses on the Budapest trotting course. There is at least one witness who claimed that Pintér as police chief appeared at the murder scene and removed the murder weapon. The two murderers got off scot-free. Apparently, they were awfully pleased when they saw “Sanyi bácsi” (Uncle Sanyi) on the scene.

Pintér was also involved with two other Hungarian underworld characters in the 1990s–Dietmar Clodo, a German, and the Ukrainian Semion Mogilevich, “Szeva bácsi” to his friends, who now lives in Moscow. Clodo was not so lucky. He was convicted in Hungary and allowed to serve his prison term in Germany. He was released in 2011. Two years later he gave an explosive interview to Antónia Rádai, a reporter for HVG, which was inexplicably overlooked by the rest of the Hungarian media. Let me quote a passage from that post of mine on Pintér:

Semion Mogilevich, whom Clodo described as his friend, asked a favor from Clodo. Mogilevich gave him a Hungarian politician’s telephone number. Clodo was instructed to phone the number and invite the Hungarian politician to his house and hand him a brief case supplied by Mogilevich. Clodo had to insist that the politician open the briefcase on the spot because in Clodo’s study behind the books was a hidden camera which recorded the exchange. There were one million deutschmarks in the briefcase. The exchange took place in 1994. At that time the name of the politician was not familiar to Clodo. “To me he was only one of the many corrupt characters to whom I had to hand similar packages in the middle of the 1990s.” In addition to this encounter there was another meeting with a politician from the same party. “The others were police officers.”

Dietmar Clodo told Antónia Rádai the name of the politician but HVG, after consulting with the paper’s lawyers, decided to withhold it.

Whoever the politician was cannot rest easy because that video might still be in the possession of Uncle Seva in Moscow.

Magyar Nemzet was planning an interview with Pintér on a wide range of questions, from the police’s handling of the demonstrations to the size of the public workforce. So, the reporter must have been quite surprised when during the discussion of the American ban on certain corrupt officials Pintér complained to him that he himself “had to endure several attempts at character assassination by foreign organizations that tried to associate [him] with certain events that have never taken place.” While Pintér was not willing to elaborate on the specifics, he added: “for example, recently the persons in question were planning to discredit [him] sometime in the near future but they were forced to give up their activities. Thus, the story is no longer of any interest.”

“By now no one even wants to ruin the reputation of Comrade Bástya?!” “It is taken care of…”

What was Pintér’s point in informing the public of his alleged harassment by foreign organizations that have been trying to blacken his good name? Given all the stories about Pintér’s past, the headline of Jenő Veress’s Népszava article on the topic was apt: “Who here has a good reputation?” Péter Németh, editor-in-chief of the same paper, in his editorial  wonders how Pintér could “force the foreign organizations not to commit character assassination.” How did he learn about such attempts, he asks. Whom does Pintér have in mind? Németh suspects that Pintér is alluding to the United States. Perhaps he fears or even knows that the Americans have something on him and thinks that it is better to forestall the impending scandal by telling the world of his innocence. However, if I may remind Pintér and his friends, that kind of tactic backfired when the government leaked information about the American investigation into Hungarian tax fraud. All the trouble started with that article in Századvég’s Napi Gazdaság. So it does not seem to be a good way of handling the dirty laundry.

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*The reference to “Comrade Bástya” in Gábor Pápai’s cartoon is to Béla Bacsó’s famous film, A tanú (1969).

The strange story of Gábor Simon and Tamás Welsz

It was in early February that Gábor Simon, one of the vice chairmen of MSZP, was discovered to have a large account in an Austrian bank. Magyar Nemzet reported that the socialist politician had made two deposits, of €575,000 and $163,000, in April 2009. The problem was that Simon, who was a member of parliament, failed to include these deposits in his yearly report on his personal finances. In no time Simon was removed from the party and shortly thereafter he resigned his parliamentary position.

MSZP desperately wanted to put an end to this embarrassing revelation; its leaders kept emphasizing that Simon’s financial affairs had nothing to do with the party. Their political opponents, however, refused to let go of the story. Magyar Nemzet published numerous articles in which they tried to connect Simon’s millions to MSZP. Surely, the argument went, Simon was hiding the party’s money in his own foreign bank accounts.

Eventually Magyar Nemzet stopped pursuing that alleged chain of guilt, although for a while they tried to tie the money to an MSZP politician in Budapest’s District XIII. But then came the news on March 6 that Simon’s money most likely had something to do with Tamás Welsz, a businessman with a checkered career whose activities ranged over three continents: Europe, Africa, and South America. Welsz in the past had had some run-ins with the authorities and was (until yesterday) wanted by Interpol. Yet the Hungarian police and prosecutors didn’t arrest him. In fact, last November, after being interrogated, he and his girlfriend Andrea Horthy were released.

Index reported on March 6 that Simon had another bank account in Hungary which he had opened under a false name. Magyar Nemzet, which  has excellent connections with Hungarian prosecutors, seemed to know that the relationship between Simon and Welsz came to light as the result of a search of Velsz’s house in Érd. There in a safe they found a forged Guinea-Bissau passport in the name of Gabriel Derdák. Simon’s mother’s maiden name is Erzsébet Derdák. The authorities allege that Welsz, who had good relations with the totally corrupt government of Guinea-Bissau, got about 500 blank passports which he sold to people who for one reason or another needed an alias or just another passport. Simon/Derdák with his African passport opened an account in a MagNet Bank on Andrássy Street. The deposit was again large: €250,000.

Gábor Simon and Tamás Welsz
Source: Index

Shortly after the revelations about the safe and the false passports Magyar Nemzet went into high gear. Welsz was described as a man with “excellent” connections to MSZP politicians. They claimed that several  MSZP politicians wanted to buy Guinea-Bissau passports, not just Simon. They singled out János Veres, former minister of finance who seems to be a favorite target of Magyar Nemzet and HírTV, both owned by the same concern. Veres announced that he doesn’t know Welsz and that he has no Guinea-Bissau passport; he sued both Magyar Nemzet and HírTV. Magyar Nemzet retreated somewhat, saying that Veres only “contemplated” acquiring a false passport but in the end changed his mind.

Why did the investigators decide to search Welsz’s house? My hunch is that Welsz offered to give up Simon if the Hungarian authorities would release him. I suspect that the investigators knew about Simon’s bank accounts as early as last November when Welsz and his girlfriend were arrested. And not just the bank accounts in Austria but possibly about the €250,000 under the name of Gabriel Derdák as well. The authorities may have postponed acting on this information so it would have the maximum electoral punch. At any event, four days after the police searched Tamás Welsz’s house, on March 10, Simon was taken into custody.

Once the authorities went public with the information about Simon’s wrongdoings, they dragged the story out for a month, thereby providing political fodder for the pro-government press.  Day after day the public read about the sordid financial activities of this high-ranking MSZP official, activities (so the accusations went) that implicated the party as a whole. Four years ago similar stories helped propel Fidesz to its overwhelming victory. Why shouldn’t the strategy work again?

All seemed to be going according to plan, but then came yesterday’s shocking news. According to the Budapest police, Welsz was sitting in the back seat of a police car heading to the Budapest Central Investigative Prosecutor’s Office in Budapest when he suddenly became ill. He was to taken the nearest hospital, but the doctors couldn’t revive him. Welsz was 41 years old and looked like the picture of health. So far the police have not provided any official information about his death–I assume they are waiting for the results of the autopsy–and as a result all sorts of rumors are circulating.

Leaked police information is contradictory. Some reporters claim that Welsz was already feeling ill before he traveled from his home in Érd to Budapest. Others say that he told the police he had taken poison and would die soon. (But then why didn’t the police immediately call an ambulance?) Some people talk about his excellent health and his upbeat mood; others report his anxiety. One report insists that he was hand-cuffed; others deny it. HVG told its readers that the people Welsz was fingering are not at all those everybody suspects, i.e., MSZP politicians. His revelations, they wrote, will surprise everybody. From this one would surmise that he had information on some Fidesz people. Whatever happened, Welsz is dead under very strange circumstances which means–as Veres pointed out yesterday on ATV–that anyone can use the blank passports to frame opposition politicians. Dead men don’t talk.

Many people think that Welsz may have been a Hungarian national security agent. József Gulyás, formerly an SZDSZ member of parliament and now a supporter of Együtt 2014, is demanding that the parliamentary committee on national security convene to question representatives from the Office of the Defense of the Constitution and other organizations dealing with national security.

This whole story is too bizarre for words. And extremely suspicious. But the more convoluted the story is and the longer it takes to decipher, the more it would seem to serve Fidesz’s political purposes. This will be a front-page story for quite a while, unless Fidesz has something else up its sleeve. They did promise three surprises: the Simon case was first, then came Zuschlag. Who will be the third?

Outrageous police reaction to crimes against the Hungarian Roma

Today’s topic is the Hungarian police’s decision not to investigate the attack on a Roma family in Devecser, one of the villages that earlier fell victim to the red sludge that covered acres and acres of land around a factory producing aluminum. I didn’t deal with this specific incident except as one in a series of anti-Roma attacks by far-right groups during the summer of 2012. However, here is a description of what happened on August 5, 2012 from The Economist. “You are going to die here,” shouted members of a 1,000-strong march as they stopped at houses they thought were a home to Roma, hurling their water bottles and stones to emphasize their point.” The Economist also mentioned that “not a peep of condemnation [came] from Fidesz.”

Ever since that time the Hungarian police have been investigating, taking their sweet time trying to ascertain whether a crime of incitement against the Roma minority occurred in Devecser. One would think that it shouldn’t take a year to come to the conclusion that inciting a crowd to kill people is a crime. But it seems that in Hungary it takes the police a year to decide the opposite. The police in Veszprém county announced a week ago that they found that no crime had been committed and they therefore stopped the investigation. According to the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and TASZ, the Hungarian equivalent of the American Civil Liberties Union, it was a clear case of incitement and there was a good chance that the court would hand down a verdict against the neo-Nazi groups present in Devecser. But the Hungarian police prevented that from happening.

Before the attack on houses of Gypsies several extremist leaders gave speeches in which they called on their audience to kill the Roma. How else can one interpret such a sentence as “we must stamp out the phenomenon; we must exterminate it from our Lebensraum.” According to the Criminal Code, this kind of incitement against an ethnic group is a serious crime that may result in three years of jail time. Moreover, as a result of these speeches the crowd actually went on a rampage. The Gypsies under siege feared for their lives.

Marching toward to the Romas’ houses in Devecser, August 5, 2012

How can the police explain dropping the investigation for lack of evidence? According to them, the person “who incites doesn’t address the intellect but appeals to primitive instincts which may result in possible action.” In their opinion, the utterances in this case “did not contain intemperate, antagonistic statements that may induce maleficent action.” What could be heard from the leaders of these extremist groups, according to the police, may be offensive to the Roma population and morally reprehensible, but these extremists cannot be punished by the instruments of the criminal justice system.

Organizations involved with human rights cases decided to appeal the case. One group, called Tett és Védelem Alapítvány (Action and Defense Foundation), will appeal to the Constitutional Court. The president of the Foundation told members of the media that in the last nine months he himself reported 28 cases involving incitement against minority groups but they were all ignored by the police. A day later, however, we learned that there will be an investigation into the case of a member of the far-right crowd in Devecser who, most likely unintentionally, hurled a rock at a Jobbik member of parliament, who as a result suffered a slight head injury.

Meanwhile another case emerged that sheds light on the thinking of the Hungarian police when it comes to hate speech and incitement against minorities. One of the speakers in Devecser was Zsolt Tyirityán, leader of the Army of Outlaws. On October 23, 2012, he delivered another speech in Budapest; this time the targets were the Jews. He vented his hatred of certain Jews who “should be put into freight cars and taken a good distance away and put to work.” The Tett és Védelem Foundation again demanded a police investigation of this incitement case, but the Budapest police refused to investigate. The reasons? One was that this speech is still on YouTube because not enough people complained about the speech’s content. Otherwise, YouTube would have removed it. And the second was that one cannot talk about incitement when “the whole audience shares the speaker’s ideology .” In this case we “should rather talk about agreement of the participants.” So, it seems that according to the Hungarian authorities one can speak of incitement only if not all listeners agree with the speaker. 168 Óra, which reported on the bizarre police rationalization for not investigating, gave the following title to the article: “According to the police one can deliver a Nazi speech before Nazis.”

But don’t fear, the Hungarian police are quite ready to act when it comes to members of national minorities. An organization called Roma Közösségi Hálózat and several other Roma groups staged a small demonstration in front of the Ministry of Interior after the police refused to investigate the Devecser case. The man who organized the demonstration was Jenő Setét, a Roma activist. There were only about 30 people present, who kept repeating the slogan: “The police shouldn’t assist the Nazis.” The final result was a misdemeanor charge against Setét.

It is my impression that Hungarian policemen, who were somewhat constrained during the socialist-liberal administrations, now feel empowered to act aggressively, sometimes illegally, against ordinary citizens and minorities, especially Gypsies. I have been collecting evidence to prove my point and in the near future will give some examples of what I mean.

Possible criminal activities of some Hungarian politicians?

This is a very old story with a new twist. It goes back to what is known as the Hungarian “mafia war,” which began with the murder of József Prisztás in 1996 and continued a few days later with the death of Csaba Lakatos, the driver of Prisztás’s race horses, on the Budapest trotting course. It was in connection with this murder that Sándor Pintér’s name emerged as someone who might know more about the mafia war than he should. I remind you that Sándor Pintér was chief of the Hungarian national police force between 1991 and 1996 and has twice been Viktor Orbán’s minister of interior.

In the 1990s the most important figure of the Russian mafia, the Ukrainian Semion Mogilevich, lived in Budapest. Right now he resides in Moscow and, although the Russian authorities have to be fully aware of all his crimes, he is left to live a life of luxury with his Hungarian wife and three children. Another famous mafia chief and a friend of “Szeva bácsi” (Uncle Seva), as he was called by his friends in Budapest, was the German Dietmar Clodo, who in the 1980s was arrested for bank robbery at least twice in Germany. Eventually Clodo was arrested in Hungary and received a ten-year jail sentence which he was able to serve in Germany. He was released in 2011 and since then has been living in Berlin running a security firm.

What does all this have to do with Pintér? In 1998, after Pintér was nominated to be minister of the interior, the parliamentary committee on national security headed by György Keleti (MSZP) found evidence that Pintér might have been involved with some of the important characters in the Hungarian underworld. Specifically with Clodo. During the interrogation of someone who himself became the victim of the mafia war it came to light that Clodo’s wife testified that a high-ranking policeman, who turned out to be Pintér, visited her husband several times sometime in 1997. This testimony reached the parliamentary committee that was deciding on Pintér’s appointment. During the questioning Pintér had serious mental lapses concerning his relationship to Clodo. At first he denied that he ever met Clodo, but eventually he admitted that he had met him once at a trade show but didn’t know that Clodo was Clodo because he introduced himself as Edward. A few days later Világgazdaság learned that Clodo registered at the trade show under his own name. In brief, Pintér’s story was full of holes.

Sándor Pintér and Viktor Orbán

But that was not all. There is a good possibility that Pintér might have been involved after the fact with the murder of Csaba Lakatos. Although he denied it, according to the police report filled out at the time he either removed the gun found at the crime scene or replaced it with another gun. When the police eventually found the twins who apparently killed Lakatos, a policeman present at the arrest reported that they were relieved when they were arrested and that they said “as long as Uncle Sanyi is the chief of police … we will be safe.” The next day the two men were released from custody.

And back to the present. HVG‘s Antónia Rádai, who once already revealed details about the connection between civil servants and the Hungarian mafia, decided to have an interview with Dietmar Clodo.* Why exactly now is an interesting question. After all, Clodo has been out of jail for the last two or three years. It is possible that Clodo was the one who approached HVG with his story. In any case, Rádai had a long interview with Clodo.

Here it is what she learned. According to Clodo, he met Pintér three times. First, indeed, at the trade show in 1997 when Pintér was no longer the national police chief. Clodo at that point was in the safety glass business and Pintér was the owner of a security firm called Preventív Security. They met two more times, but at the end there was no business deal.

Apparently Pintér’s offer was more than shady. Now shady deals were part and parcel of Clodo’s business practice, but if he took a risk at least he wanted to reap benefits from the deal. What Pintér offered would have benefited only himself. He proposed that Clodo replace the safety glass used in police cars with the kind used in shop windows. Pintér would make sure that the police units in the provinces would buy his safety glass. The difference in price between the real and the inferior glass would go to Pintér. No wonder Clodo said no. If true, this story certainly calls into question Pintér’s “business dealings.” Sándor Pintér, it should be noted, is an extremely rich man.

Potentially even more damning are Clodo’s stories about the connection between the Russian mafia and a Hungarian politician. Semion Mogilevich, whom Clodo described as his friend, asked a favor from Clodo. Mogilevich gave him a Hungarian politician’s telephone number. Clodo was instructed to phone the number and invite the Hungarian politician to his house and hand him a brief case supplied by Mogilevich. Clodo had to insist that the politician open the briefcase on the spot because in Clodo’s study behind the books was a hidden camera which recorded the exchange. There were one million deutschmarks in the briefcase. The exchange took place in 1994. At that time the name of the politician was not familiar to Clodo. “To me he was only one of the many corrupt characters to whom I had to hand similar packages in the middle of the 1990s.” In addition to this encounter there was another meeting with a politician from the same party. “The others were police officers.”

Dietmar Clodo told Antónia Rádai the name of the politician but HVG, after consulting with the paper’s lawyers, decided to withhold it.

The amazing thing is that practically no one picked up on this story. Perhaps one reason is that the younger generation of Hungarian journalists simply don’t remember Clodo or Uncle Seva and don’t realize the significance of this interview. But it is hard to believe that no one is interested in the person who allegedly received the one million marks from Semion Mogilevich in that briefcase. The only reporter who followed up on the interview was György Bolgár, who interviewed Rádai on his radio show. He rightly pointed out that, if this story is true, whoever this politician is can’t feel safe. After all, that video might still be in the possession of Uncle Seva in Moscow.

What about the opposition parties? Well, MSZP and Együtt-PM don’t seem to be too sharp either. It was only DK’s Ágnes Vadai who asked Chief Prosecutor Péter Polt whether he is planning to investigate this old case in light of this new development. Vadai added that if this story is true there are people who play important roles in Hungarian politics who might have committed serious crimes twenty years ago. I guess we can pretty safely predict that if Vadai gets an answer at all it will be in the negative.

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*The full interview by Antónia Rádai is still not available on the Internet. I had to rely on summaries of the story given by other publications.