My good friend Miklós Haraszti, one of the founders of SZDSZ who played an important role in the transitional period from the one-party state to democracy, spoke yesterday with György Bolgár of Klub Rádió on the best way to handle the seemingly hopeless political situation in Hungary. Instead of trying to figure out what on earth Viktor Orbán means by Christian freedom, we should concentrate on one thing: the criminal nature of the Orbán regime, which is its essence and purpose.

Commentators who argue over the nature of Orbán’s ideology are wasting their time because the alleged ideological underpinning of the regime is immaterial. The soft belly of the regime is thievery, graft, and corruption. Both the regime’s nominal allies and the Hungarian people must understand that at issue is a culture of criminality led by the prime minister, who is the head of a mafia family in the strict sense of the word. What we have to do, said Haraszti, is to repeat every day that Orbán’s major purpose in life is stealing from his own people and indirectly from the taxpayers of western European countries, whose tax euros enable Orbán and his criminal gang to perpetuate their rule over a country of close to 10 million people. Even his nationalist frenzy serves only his main aim, to prevent any oversight of his activities by European Union authorities. His insistence on sovereignty is simply part of the defense mechanism he created to keep any knowledge of his activities under lock and key.

The Microsoft case is one example of this pervasive corruption and, at the same time, the difficulty of leveling charges at the highest level of the Hungarian government. Originally, commentators expected that Microsoft would face a fine as large as a billion U.S. dollars, but the actual fine was in the low millions ($13,780,733 and $2,784,418). I suspect that one of the reasons for the leniency was Microsoft Hungary’s cooperation, “including conducting a thorough internal investigation and collecting, analyzing, organizing, and translating voluminous evidence and information.”

The four Hungarian employees who were found guilty, however, refused to cooperate with the investigators who arrived in Budapest in December 2015. Since government officials, middlemen, and the four Microsoft employees were all complicit, they had every reason to remain quiet. Their futures were at stake. If they had talked, they could most likely have implicated, in addition to themselves, multiple government officials, including the prime minister and his son-in-law, who had purchased an inexpensive, barely functioning IT company in order to profit from the hundreds of millions that fell into the laps of these intermediaries. Instead, some of the key players in the fraud were duly rewarded for their silence and abiding loyalty. For example, Viktor Sagyibó, who was in charge of institutional sales, landed a job in the prime minister’s office to oversee all IT purchases.

It seems that the Microsoft investigation continued after the 2015 and 2016 shakeups because it was only in the summer of 2018 that Gabriella Szentkuti, the managing director appointed after the departure of Executive I and Manager I, left Microsoft “under strange circumstances.” It is possible that even more skeletons will fall out of that closet since the DOJ document stated that the investigation was ongoing at Microsoft.

But let’s go back to the “original sin,” the 2012 meeting between B. Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft between 2005 and 2016, and Viktor Orbán. It was during this conversation that the decision was made that any business conducted between the Hungarian government and Microsoft must be funneled through a number of smaller Hungarian firms. From The Wall Street Journal article of last August, we know that Viktor Orbán was not alone at that meeting. Hungarian business owners were included in the negotiations at the prime minister’s insistence. The message was: either Microsoft sells through these firms or it doesn’t sell at all.

These Hungarian intermediaries must have been handpicked. His son-in-law’s somewhat belated purchase of an IT company indicates to me that Orbán was fully aware of the profitability of the scheme; otherwise he wouldn’t have suggested this business opportunity to István Tiborcz. As we know, it was on Viktor Orbán’s suggestion that Tiborcz got into the LED lighting business to capitalize on the EU money available to provide more efficient street lighting.

The inclusion of middlemen as a vehicle of institutionalized corruption was not unique to Hungary. Microsoft’s Romanian corruption scandal, which broke in 2014, was organized in exactly the same way. The only difference between the two cases is that in Romania the National Anticorruption Directorate, headed by Laura Codruţa Kövesi, who currently is being considered to become the first European Public Prosecutor, investigated the case. By 2016 she secured the convictions of five individuals, including ministers. Their sentences were stiff, with prison terms ranging from two to six years and hefty fines.

By contrast, the Hungarian Prosecutor’s Office headed by Péter Polt, a former Fidesz politician who has the job of making sure that Orbán’s criminal activities will never see the light of day, did nothing when his office received a demand for investigation. Now, with the release of this document, the prosecutors promise to inquire from the U.S. Department of Justice whether they have “relevant material they can share” with the Hungarians. Given the possible complicity of high government officials in the case, it is doubtful that anything will happen. We know their tricks. Months will go by before the “relevant material” arrives. Then they will need months for an “official translation.” By that time at least one year will have passed. Then, they will investigate endlessly, and maybe in five years we will be told that they found nothing that would warrant bringing charges against the individuals involved.

There is only one hope. In 2017, as a result of a Jobbik proposal, parliament unanimously voted to extend the statute of limitations for corruption cases to 12 years. The corrupt Orbán regime will thus, by definition, never be able to run out the clock. They might avoid prosecution in the Microsoft case but, since government corruption is pervasive and ongoing, no matter how long Orbán and company are in power they will eventually face the long arm of justice.

July 31, 2019