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One of the new Hungarian government’s key pledges was to recover state assets and financial instruments that have been unlawfully managed or have gone missing and to prevent further abuses.
To this end, a special authority is being set up; its head was elected on Friday by secret ballot, with 145 votes for Anna Unger.
At the same time, the institution’s deputy head, Katalin Tasnádi, was appointed as deputy president in charge of investigations. The institution will be run by a five-member leadership, three of whom will be responsible for specific areas of expertise, making it possible to involve the expert who lost the election in its work in an active role.
Background
During the week, parliament’s Committee on Justice and Constitutional Affairs finally heard three of the 96 candidates: Anna Róza Unger, a political scientist and lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE); lawyer Miklós Ligeti, legal director of Transparency International Hungary; and Nicholas Sárvári, a Canadian-Hungarian businessman who runs a company specialising in international asset recovery and crisis management.
At the hearing, Unger warned that it would be unrealistic to expect final judgments in all major corruption cases within six years. In her programme, she spoke not only about uncovering individual cases, but also about dismantling the institutional and political system that makes corruption possible.
In the debate before the parliamentary vote, the prime minister stressed that the government plans to speed up and shorten criminal proceedings in order to prevent delaying tactics and impunity.
The committee eventually recommended Anna Unger to the National Assembly. Miklós Ligeti received four votes in favour and four abstentions; six MPs supported Unger’s nomination, one opposed it and one abstained. Nicholas Sárvári did not receive sufficient support.
What is its mandate? It can investigate and bring charges
Setting up the NVVH was not, in itself, a precondition laid down in law for the release of EU funds, but there is nonetheless a close political and trust-related link between the two issues, as Brussels withheld a significant share of the money due to Hungary because it did not consider corruption prevention, the monitoring of EU subsidies and the consistent investigation of irregularities to be sufficiently guaranteed.
Together with Hungary’s decision to join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, the NVVH is also intended to signal that the new government not only wants to protect future EU funds, but also intends to track down and recover public money that was previously spent unlawfully. The authority will therefore not “turn on the Brussels money tap,” but its ability to function, its independence and its effectiveness could provide important proof that Hungary is capable of offering proper guarantees for the lawful use of EU funds.
The office’s task is to track down, secure and, where possible, recover money and other assets that have unlawfully been removed from public ownership, but its powers are much broader than that. It can examine state and municipal decisions, public procurement procedures, concessions, subsidies, EU funds, state-owned enterprises, chains of contracts, financial flows and the real beneficial owners behind them.
The NVVH will not simply be a supervisory or advisory body. It will be able to conduct its own investigations and preliminary proceedings, request and cross-match data, initiate action by other authorities, and in the case of certain corruption offences and crimes involving public assets it will be able to carry out investigations itself.
The office may also take over cases that are still pending before an indictment is brought, if it considers that this would allow the state’s criminal or financial claims to be asserted more effectively. In such cases it can step into the shoes of the prosecution service, bring charges and then represent the case as public prosecutor before the court. With this, and after the amendment of the Fundamental Law, the Prosecutor General’s Office has lost its previous monopoly on acting as public prosecutor.
The institution will be able to use administrative, criminal-law and civil-law instruments in parallel. This is the source of its strength, but also of the main rule-of-law concerns: with such wide-ranging powers, it will be particularly important to see what internal oversight, judicial control and public accountability mechanisms will limit the discretion of its leadership.
Selection process sparked fierce debate
Critics of the nomination procedure objected that while the committee had already selected three candidates to go through to the next round, the Tisza parliamentary group later put forward Nicholas Sárvári as a separate nominee. This raised the question of whether the candidate backed by the group was competing on the same terms as the other participants in the open call.
Many considered Miklós Ligeti to be the most qualified and experienced of the candidates, and therefore described the choice of Unger as outrageous and worrying. Other critics pointed out that Unger is a political scientist and does not have a background as a prosecutor or investigator of the kind usually required to run a law-enforcement body of this size. Supporters, however, argue that the president’s primary task will not be to lead individual investigations, but to build and provide strategic direction for an independent institution that brings together different areas of expertise.
MPs from Fidesz and the Mi Hazánk party did not take part in the committee’s decision. According to Fidesz, the NVVH has been given excessively broad investigative, prosecutorial and information-gathering powers without adequate external checks, and the authority could therefore easily become a tool for political score-settling. The party has also initiated a constitutional court review.
The success of the new authority will not be determined by how many high-profile proceedings it launches, but by whether its investigations lead to indictments that stand up in court, final judgments and assets actually recovered. Part of the money may be hidden in foreign bank accounts, complex corporate networks, real estate or ownership structures that are hard to identify, and recovering it may require lengthy international legal proceedings.
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