The Samsung factory in Göd is completely safe – Gulyás

Samsung SDI's plant in Göd, Hungary operates in compliance with all environmental and occupational safety regulations and its operations are transparent, Samsung announced on Tuesday in a statement sent to the Hungarian State News Agency, MTI.

The company was responding to the investigative article published on Telex, in which we reported that the authorities identified extremely severe occupational health and safety violations at Samsung's battery factory in Göd between 2022 and 2023. They found that in some parts of the factory, workers were repeatedly exposed to chemical substances in quantities significantly exceeding the maximum permissible limits. Our article also included information about a meeting of the Orbán government in the spring of 2023.

According to our sources, at this meeting, the participating ministers received a secret service report detailing the extremely serious cases of poisoning that had been occurring at the battery plant. The documents acquired by Telex show that some workers were exposed to carcinogenic chemicals at levels 510 times higher than the allowed limit, and for an extended time. According to our information, at the government meeting in question, several ministers, including Antal Rogán, argued for suspending the factory's operations, while Péter Szijjártó lobbied against the closure.

Péter Magyar, president of the Tisza Party, reacted to the information in the article by calling for the immediate resignation of Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Péter Szijjártó. According to him, the minister was fully aware of the serious environmental contamination and poisoning caused by the Göd plant, and he still chose to use his influence to prevent the suspension of the plant's operations. He argued that by doing so, the foreign minister “directly endangered the health of the 7,500 people working at the factory and the tens of thousands of people living in the surrounding area.”

Independent MP Bence Tordai announced on social media that he would "file the necessary complaints in order to expose the biggest environmental and public health scandal since the fall of communism”.

"We are calling for heads to roll," István Apáti, MP of the far-right Mi Hazánk announced, saying that he believes that some ministers should resign following the publication of our investigative article on the factory.

Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó, who has been a vocal advocate of bringing battery plants to Hungary, described our article, supported with documentation as “a tsunami of lies” and said he would take the necessary legal steps against Telex. He also said that Péter Magyar made some extremely harsh accusations against him, which, according to him, are lies, so he will file a criminal complaint against him.

When our team managed to catch up with the Foreign Minister in Budapest, we asked him to specify the exact statements in the article he believed to be untrue. He dismissed our repeated inquiries and insisted that we should have contacted him prior to the publication of our article if we wanted such answers. Incidentally, we did contact him weeks before the piece was published via email, which we subsequently made public in response to his claim. When speaking to another outlet, Szijjártó claimed that there was no such cabinet meeting at all.

Speaking later in the week at the government briefing, Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office Gergely Gulyás said that the Göd factory is "completely safe" and that the whole story is simple "campaign humbug", adding that he doesn't believe any consultation on the matter was necessary. In response to our question, the minister said that the independence of the environmental protection authority is guaranteed despite the fact that Richárd Tarnai, head of the Pest County Government Office will be Fidesz's candidate in the upcoming elections. According to Gulyás, both Tarnai and the other county governors had sworn to abide by and enforce the rules, which was a sufficient enough guarantee for him.

The minister believes that Telex wrote the article about the Göd factory in order to worsen Fidesz's chances at the upcoming election, and the article “isn’t based in reality”. He called it an outright lie that the government ever discussed a report about the Göd factory having concealed its pollution data from the authorities and denied that the secret services had been deployed to investigate the battery plant.

The question is particularly significant in regards to Gergely Gulyás, because his ministry was responsible for overseeing government agencies (such as the Occupational Health and Safety Authority, which carried out the inspections at the plant) during the period in question.

This means that if a government agency needed to report a problem further up the chain, they would likely have had to report it to Gulyás's ministry. At Thursday's government briefing, Gulyás was asked by three different independent outlets, including Telex, whether he knew about the extreme health hazards some of Samsung's workers had been exposed to during the period in question.

He repeatedly claimed that he does not remember whether he received such information about Samsung at the time, and said that he only learned about the extent of the irregularities from our article. According to him, Prime Minister Orbán also found out about the serious violations at the South Korean battery producer’s Hungarian plant from our article.

The Pest County Government Office, which oversees the Occupational Health and Safety Authority, also released a statement in response to our article. In it, they wrote that "the operation of the Samsung factory has never presented a threat to the environment." What their statement did not contain was the claim that Samsung has never exposed its own employees to health risks, which makes sense, considering that they themselves had previously acknowledged that this was in fact the case.