Orbán: There was no governmental 
instruction in case of Ukrainian cash transport

“As Prime Minister of the national government, I am proud that in Hungary, we have successfully put an end to and eliminated Europe’s biggest corruption scandal—the financial operations of the Ukrainian mafia,” Viktor Orbán wrote in a statement sent to MTI.

In doing so, he was presumably responding to a statement made on Thursday by Romulusz Ruszin-Szendi, in which the Minister of Defense called the former prime minister to account. Ruszin-Szendi wrote that issuing orders is easy, but taking responsibility is more difficult, and he called on Orbán to state whether or not he had given the order for the raid on the Ukrainian cash transport in March.

According to Orbán, the authorities acted in an exemplary and successful fashion, operating within their own jurisdiction and performing their duties exceptionally well even without instructions from the government. If it had been necessary, he would have issued the appropriate instructions.

“The authorities and experts involved in this case deserve recognition and should be rewarded for their work. It is a shame that the current government is vilifying its own employees who have served the nation’s interest best, simply for acting in accordance with their duties,”

wrote the former prime minister.

It was revealed yesterday that in addition to János Hajdu, the former head of the Counterterrorism Center, and the former head of the legal department at the Constitution Protection Office, three police officers are also under investigation in connection with the raiding of the Ukrainian cash shipment. Although in his statement, Orbán wrote about the continent’s biggest corruption scandal and a successful operation, the National Tax and Customs Administration (NAV) suspended the investigation into money laundering in June and then closed it in August due to lack of evidence of a criminal offence.

On March 5, operatives of the Counterterrorism Center (Terrorelhárítási Központ-TEK) detained seven Ukrainian citizens near Budapest and seized gold and foreign currency worth more than 27 billion forints (nearly 73 million 600 thousand euros) from the CIT vehicles they were escorting. According to the Prosecutor's Office, they acted in response to a tip. It was later revealed that the source of the tip was one of the Hungarian intelligence agencies, the Constitution Protection Office, which was prompted by information gathered from another agency, the Information Office. But by then, the Orbán government had been using the story in its election campaign, linking the money to the financing of the Tisza Party.

Telex was the first to report that it was Viktor Orbán who had decided to intercept the Ukrainian Oschadbank’s cash shipment, and even the timing of the raid was decided at the highest levels of government. However, there was no professional justification for the raid, sources familiar with the details of the operation against the Ukrainian CIT vehicles told Telex. A prosecutor who has had access to the files of the secret service concluded that “the Constitution Protection Office failed to provide sufficient evidence to support its claim that the shipment was a risk to national security.”