Three days ago, thanks to 444.hu, the Hungarian public at last learned about a robbery that had actually taken place during the night of April 7. In the last three months not a word about it has leaked out, despite an extensive police investigation. The effort to keep the case under wraps is not at all surprising because the burglary occurred at the office of Arton Capital, one of the four companies that were entitled to sell residency bonds.
The residency bond project was launched in 2013. It allowed a citizen of a non-European country to “buy” a resident permit for the duration of five years by purchasing €250,000 worth of Hungarian government bonds. In 2015 that amount was raised to €300,000. I called the project “the Orbán government’s colossal swindle” in one of my posts. Anyone who’s interested in the details should read that post, in which I explained that the greatest beneficiaries of this arrangement were the four companies that had the exclusive right to sell the bonds. According to estimates, these companies made a real killing, receiving about a third of the 1.2 billion euros the state got from the residency bonds.
When 444.hu first reported on the heist, few details were known, just that the burglars took cash and that the amount of money was in the millions. A few hours later RTL Klub knew the exact figures: altogether 1.9 euros were stolen. One million was in a safe and the rest was in an unlocked desk drawer. The safe was gone and so was the server with the complete documentation of all the sales, including personal data of the purchasers.
This burglary has been taken very seriously. According to accounts, the police have pulled out all the stops in trying to solve the case. Index reported that 1,300 people have been questioned in connection with this affair.
We have always suspected that this whole residency bond arrangement, devised by Antal Rogán, served only one purpose: to siphon off as much public money as possible and pass it into individual pockets and most likely also into Fidesz’s coffers. Under normal circumstances, all transactions should have been conducted by drafts or promissory notes. Moreover, if this large amount of cash was part of the clients’ handling fee that varied between €45,000 and €60,000 per residency bond, how did these cash payments reach Arton Capital in Budapest in the first place? A person can legally bring a maximum of €10,000 into the country in cash. The answer of course is that it was done illegally, possibly with the assistance of the authorities.
The burglars were skilled. Their entry and their movements inside the offices showed a high level of professionalism. I assume they were familiar with the place and knew exactly what they were after. Naturally, as always happens in such cases, so-called experts, mostly former police officers, come up with all sorts of fancy explanations–from self-robbery to foreign secret service agents who are after the personal data of the people to whom Hungary so generously allowed free access to the whole European Union. In any case, it looks like a complicated case to me. Even if the usually inept Hungarian police find the culprits, I don’t think we will ever learn the real story behind this huge amount of cash stashed away in an unlocked drawer and a safe.
The weak and usually powerless opposition, especially Jobbik and LMP, has been trying to organize an investigative committee to look into this very suspicious business around the residency bonds. Naturally, Fidesz made sure that no such committee would be formed. Therefore, last November Jobbik, LMP, and the tiny Liberal Party decided to form a “shadow committee” and began their own, unofficial investigation of the clearly illegal and corrupt money laundering business conducted by the Orbán government. At that time, the opposition members of parliament who participated in the shadow committee hoped to finish their job by the spring. After this initial announcement I didn’t see any sign of their activities, although they had ambitious plans, including holding hearings where employees of the Immigration and Citizenship Authority would be called to testify. But now, after the burglary, the shadow committee suddenly revived. They announced that they want to talk to the representatives of the four companies who are in the residency bond business. Good luck, since I’m certain that the men and women in question have no intention of being questioned by members of an opposition shadow committee. On the other hand, a representative of the Liberal Party claims that the members of the committee have learned that the residency bond project is “a professionally organized criminal undertaking.”
A Jobbik member of the committee, Andrea Varga-Damm, was Olga Kálmán’s guest on HírTV yesterday where she revealed an important piece of information, which is most likely the result of the investigation this shadow committee has been conducting in the last few months. The law that established the project was enacted on December 27, 2012. Twenty-six days earlier, on December 1, the government made some small changes in the bill, which up to that point had allowed the companies to hold only a certain amount of money in petty cash. That limit was abolished, most likely not quite independently from the forthcoming residency bond project. Talk about “a professional organized criminal undertaking.” All was prepared for the killing ahead.