Simicska: Orban said he refused to enroll as spy but “now I don’t know what to think”

Budapest, March 9 (MTI) – Businessman Lajos Simicska has said that Prime Minister Viktor Orban “reported on him” to the communist authorities with his knowledge during their military service in the 1980s.

Simicska told the Mandiner blog in an interview published late on Sunday that the authorities had put him under surveillance during the communist era, and while performing military service he was shown a “thick batch of files”. Orban had voluntarily told him he was writing the reports and they had discussed what to include, he said. After they were discharged, Orban told him the authorities, subsequent to his military service, had “tried to enroll him but he said no.” Simicska said that he had believed him but “now I don’t know what to think.”

The cabinet office responded by supplying documents which show that Orban had been asked to report to the authorities but had refused. The documents were part of a reply to a lawmaker’s written question posed to Orban in 2012. In this response, Orban stated that he and his wife and then opposition friends had been put under surveillance in the 1980s.

“They used all kinds of secret service tools against us. We were under surveillance, tailed by intelligence, wiretapped at our workplace, in our homes and even in our bedrooms,” Orban wrote in response to a question by Agnes Vadai, a senior official of the leftist opposition Democratic Coalition (DK).

Orban and Simicska, who is two years older than Orban, met while attending the same secondary school in Szekesfehervar, central Hungary.

On Feb. 6, the heads of Magyar Nemzet, Hir TV, Lanchid Radio, and Magyar Nemzet Online, media outlets in which Simicska had held stakes, resigned after daily Nepszava online reported that Simicska had declared a “total media war” in the wake of the government decision on the tax on advertisements which affect Simicska’s media interests.

Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters