Hungary’s foreign ministry has filed a criminal complaint with prosecutors over what it describes as possible fraud in the previous government’s purchase of ventilators worth some 965 million dollars during the COVID-19 pandemic. Foreign Minister Anita Orban announced the move on Tuesday, saying a ministry investigation had raised suspicions of a breach of fiduciary duty that caused substantial financial loss, along with other possible offenses.
The purchase in question dates to March and April 2020, when the government then led by former Prime Minister Viktor Orban bought roughly 17,000 ventilators from China. At the time, critics argued that Hungary was acquiring far more units than it could realistically use and paying much more per unit than other European countries. The current foreign minister, who is not related to the former prime minister, said the review had examined tens of thousands of documents.
Some of those documents, she said, had to be recovered with digital tools after what she called unsuccessful attempts to delete them, and the findings raised questions about the conduct of the ministry’s former senior leadership. A separate statement on the government’s website pointed to further suspected irregularities, including that most of the ventilators were bought through intermediary companies whose revenues rose sharply as a result of the deal.
The government also said a number of the devices were defective and that a significant share were never deployed, with storage costs for the unused machines running into the millions of dollars. Taken together, the ministry framed the procurement as an episode that warranted a closer look at how public money was spent under emergency conditions.
The complaint touches on a wider set of questions about the former government’s close ties to China. Peter Szijjarto, who served as foreign minister for nearly 12 years and oversaw the ventilator purchase as well as the procurement of millions of Chinese vaccine doses, recently left Parliament to take an executive role with the Chinese carmaker BYD, a move that drew accusations of a conflict of interest. Hungary’s government has since opened a separate investigation into BYD’s large investments in the country during his tenure.
