Trusting Hungary with Billions of Euros

It’s crunch time for the Conditionality Regulation at the European Commission. In its College meeting on 22 November, the Commission is scheduled to discuss whether Hungary has actually made the 17 changes it proposed in order to avoid cuts to its Cohesion Funds. What the Commission chooses to do will depend on whether it believes that Hungary’s anti-corruption program will in fact allow Hungary to be entrusted with billions of Euros without having a sizeable fraction of those Euros pocketed by cronies. The Commission can either keep pressing the Council to make the proposed cuts or it can say “never mind.” The Commission’s recommendation will then be taken up at the ECOFIN Council meeting on 6 December, at which time the fate of the proposed cuts under the Conditionality Regulation will probably be decided.

We believe that Hungary’s reforms are designed to be ineffective and will not even begin to halt the massive corruption that is the hallmark of Hungary’s kleptocracy. In fact, one of the oligarchs closest to the government was just awarded another €120 million in government contracts this week, paid for by EU funds. It doesn’t look like the government is working very hard to fight corruption. After all, if the Hungarian government were serious, it could start tackling corruption before the EU makes them do it.

In our blogposts so far assessing Hungary’s anti-corruption program, we have shown how the new Integrity Authority, Anti-Corruption Task Force and new option for the general public to bring private prosecutions against corruption provide fake solutions to real problems. In the rest of this post, we will explain the finishing touches that the Hungarian government has put on their anti-corruption program before these November and December deadlines, discussing the other legislative measures accepted by the National Assembly in the last several months.

Updating Our Earlier Analyses

First, however, we will update you on developments in the laws we addressed in our first three blogposts.

In our post on the Integrity Authority, we showed how the process of selecting the three members of the Authority’s board included political checkpoints that would likely screen out serious critics of the Hungarian government. Now that the three members of the Authority’s board have been named, we can say that we were right. Candidates supported by the Hungarian NGO community with substantial experience actually fighting corruption were not selected or even ranked highly in the process. Of the three candidates finally selected, two have close ties to the government.

According to Telex.Hu, the new president of the authority has had 20 years of experience working in the field of fraud prevention for various international private-sector firms. No one has yet uncovered direct ties between him and the governing party. He looks like a credible figure, though he has no experience with public-sector corruption.

The two vice-presidents who complete the Authority’s board, however, appear less convincing as corruption-fighters. One is a high-level employee of EUTAF, the Hungarian agency for auditing EU funds. As we have explained before, EUTAF is not institutionally autonomous, but instead is under the control of the Hungarian Finance Ministry. It is established only by a government decree, without any basis in statute. The head of EUTAF was tasked with starting the process of picking members of the Authority by nominating the members of the Selection Committee. That Selection Committee in turn placed high on the short list one of the underlings of the person who selected them to be on the Selection Committee, so it all looks very circular. What is perhaps most peculiar about this choice, however, is that nothing is known about this new vice-president except her current job, and she does not even have a c.v. to share with the press, according to the HvG.

The other member of the board is a former head of the Budapest Transportation Authority, someone who had been fired from that job by the city mayor at the time (a Fidesz loyalist) for failing to ensure that government contracts for upgrading the system were completed both on time and to the proper specifications. According to 444.hu, complaints that he had mismanaged the agency were filed against him after he was fired. He doesn’t seem at first glance to be the most qualified person to fight corruption in public contracts. And yet he was ranked more highly than any of the candidates nominated by the anti-corruption civil sector organizations.

While there is little public information about just what happened on the way to choosing the three members of the Integrity Authority board, it appears there were some problems. One Selection Committee member was appointed from the OLAF secretariat and therefore looked like the most EU-friendly member of that committee. But that person apparently dropped out the process without giving reasons before the short list was finalized, according to 444.hu. That left the two remaining Selection Committee members with closer ties to the Hungarian government to make the final rankings of candidates. We don’t know what happened behind the scenes, but we can see that the board now in place does not inspire confidence overall for its independence from the government.

All Authority decisions are made by majority vote, which means that the government only needs two out of the three board members on its side to ensure favorable decisions. And two of the three have served in high-level political positions either in the Fidesz government or in the Budapest municipal authority when a Fidesz mayor headed it. Perhaps the three together will act in a fully independent manner once the Integrity Authority gets up and running, but the first impressions are not encouraging. In short, the Integrity Authority lacks the appearance of integrity.

With regard to the Anti-Corruption Task Force that is supposed to contain equal numbers of governmental and non-governmental representatives to make further recommendations on anti-corruption programs, we have seen no public progress so far. According to a September “normative decision” (which binds state employees without being a formal decree of general application), the deadline to get the Task Force up and running is December 1. So the government still has two weeks to go. The identity of members of this Task Force on the non-governmental side will reveal a great deal about whether the government is serious about reform, but these representatives may not in fact be appointed by the time that that Commission has to determine whether the government’s legal changes are sufficient.

With regard to the new option for members of the general public either to challenge decisions of the public prosecutor when he closes corruption investigations without indictment or to carry on corruption cases through private prosecution instead, we explained that the law had been sent to the Constitutional Court for review, and the Court had to approve the law before it went into effect. The Constitutional Court decided the matter in record time (and even published its decision in English to make sure that non-Hungarians could read it) and it found the law to be constitutional. Given the obvious conflict in the law with a provision of the constitution permitting only the public prosecutor to bring prosecutions in the public interest, this might be surprising. But we might have guessed that the packed Constitutional Court would do the government’s bidding. Now that the government wants to appear to be cooperating with Brussels, the law is deemed constitutional, even if the procedure it defines is nearly impossible to use and very expensive for anyone who tries it.

The Hungarian government promised a host of other changes to avoid funding cuts under the Conditionality Regulation procedure. The question is whether these laws actually do what the Commission had hoped. We will review the other changes that the Hungarian government has made next.

Strengthening Asset Declarations

The Hungarian government promised the European Commission that it would install a more rigorous system of asset declarations for state officials. In Act XXXI of 2022, a much larger number of state officials are now subject to more rigorous asset declarations than before and the new asset declarations have been extended to include the assets of close family of these public officials. But there is a catch. The close family that are covered by an official’s asset declaration are only spouses and children who live in the same household.

Considering where corruption has been alleged in the Prime Minister’s family, just to take one example, these asset declarations are almost perfectly designed to miss the mark. The Prime Minister’s father has won tens of millions of EU funds for public works projects, but he is not covered by the asset declaration rules for the Prime Minister because parents aren’t included even if they live with their public-official children. The Prime Minister’s son-in-law has also been famously enriched by EU funds and would be otherwise required to have his assets declared along with his father-in-law’s, but since the son-in-law lives in a different household than the Prime Minister, the asset declaration requirement doesn’t touch him either.

And of course, the various oligarchs who have been at the heart of corruption allegations as EU funds have been transferred to crony companies are completely exempt from the system because they are not state officials, even though it has long been suspected that many of the Prime Minister’s assets are under the control of his childhood friend Lörinc Mészáros (no relation either to the Prime Minister or to one of the authors of this blogpost). Mészáros is in fact the very oligarch who won almost €120 million in EU-funded contracts this week. In short, the way that the asset declaration system has been constructed conveniently leaves out everyone close to the Prime Minister whose assets have been rumored to enrich him too.

Improving Coordination with OLAF

The Hungarian government promised a more cooperative relationship with OLAF, the EU anti-fraud agency. And in Act XXIX of 2022, NAV (the National Tax and Customs Office) has been designated as the new liaison office between OLAF and the Hungarian government. NAV has jurisdiction to investigate fraud in payments into or out of the public budget, so it can look into allegations that public funds are inappropriately spent but it cannot investigate general crimes beyond that. Note that the public prosecutor, who does have a more general jurisdiction, was not specified as the liaison office despite being the logical point of contact if a government wants to prosecute corruption.

Under the new law, the normal powers of NAV are weakened when NAV is cooperating with OLAF. As a result, OLAF doesn’t get “full-strength” NAV as its anti-fraud partner; it only get “partial-strength” NAV. If NAV is engaged in a fraud investigation not involving OLAF, NAV has the power to search private residences and other private property looking for incriminating evidence without warning the owner of the property ahead of time. It was under this authority that NAV conducted a surprise raid of the church of dissident Pastor Gábor Iványi back in February in an act of brazen political intimidation of one of the government’s critics.

Under the new law, however, NAV loses the power to search private residences at all if it is running the investigation joint with OLAF (see new Article 50(A)(3) of Law CXXII of 2010 on the National Tax and Customs Administration). In addition, if private properties other than homes are searched, the owner of the property has the right to be present during the search, but only when the investigation is joint with OLAF (also under new Article 50(A)(3)). Of course that means that the owner will receive advance warning of any search, which investigators generally want to avoid if they believe that the evidence may go missing when the owner sees the search coming. Finally, if a warrant is required for any of these searches, the warrant request must be submitted a minimum of 72 hours ahead of time (new Article 50(A)(6)). That, of course, means that new evidence of fraud cannot be acted upon quickly. But that is true only if NAV is operating in cooperation with OLAF; otherwise warrants are speedier. When NAV acts in its normal investigations, without needing to coordinate with OLAF, it operates with none of these restrictions.

Maybe NAV shouldn’t have the power to raid homes and other private property without warning and without owners present, and maybe all warrants to search property should be executed with plenty of time to give the target of the warrant the chance to adjust to the incoming search. NAV has surely abused its powers in the past to harass government opponents and its activities might be less abusive if these rules were in place. But if NAV still has these powers in domestic investigations, it is hard to see why NAV shouldn’t have the same powers when it investigates cases involving the corruption of EU funds working jointly with OLAF. Unless, of course, NAV isn’t really supposed to be cooperating fully with OLAF.

Making Lawmaking Truly Public

The Hungarian government promised that its lawmaking process would become more transparent by encouraging both robust consultation about draft laws and impact assessments of the likely effects of these laws. Of course, it might have been a good start if the set of laws that established the Commission’s required anti-corruption program were themselves transparently drafted, open for public input, assessed for their likely effects, and fully debated in the Parliament with the opposition permitted to make amendments to the government’s proposals. None of that happened. The laws that the Commission will be assessing were enacted without complying with the very proposal on lawmaking that the Commission insisted that Hungary adopt.

The new Act XXX of 2022, setting out the new procedures, amended two other acts that already mandated robust “social participation” in the lawmaking process by requiring that affected groups be consulted and already required that impact assessments be conducted before laws were passed (Act CXXX of 2010 on Lawmaking and Act CXXXI of 2010 on Social Participation Regarding Legislative Drafting). So now, apparently the government really has to do both, neither of which it had routinely done before. The new law adds only that the National Statistical Office shall take the lead in providing statistical data both on the general parameters of lawmaking (e.g. were the relevant groups consulted? were the provisions on social consultation followed?) and on the anticipated effects of the laws (providing data relevant to the impact assessment). (This amendment is inserted into Act on Lawmaking, new Article 17/B.) It is quite unclear just how this is to increase accountability when the National Statistical Office has absolutely no powers of enforcement.

In addition, the government promised the European Commission that at least 90% of legislative drafts will now go through the regular lawmaking process (a commitment now added as Article 5/A of the Act on Social Participation) rather than using the fast-track process that bypasses many of these steps. The Hungarian government has become rather famous for using expedited lawmaking for almost all important laws, including the 2011 Fundamental Law itself, as well as most of the constitutional amendments and many of the original and amended “cardinal laws” that require a two-thirds vote to pass and that regulate fundamental