The internal war of the Hungarian Roma: embezzlement, fraud and complaints

According to Istvan Hegedus, current President of the National Roma Self-Government (ORO), Florian Farkas and his men left a more than HUF 120 million debt, besides their money-stealing projects. The relationship between the new and the former President has heavily deteriorated recently: since Hegedus also speaks about the suspicious affairs of Farkas, the latter and his men are working to fail Hegedus. Index.hu knows that the Prime Minister’s commissioner (Florian Farkas) set people his side with promises of assignments worth hundreds of thousands of forints.

For example, there was a property in Szolnok which was got to the ORO for property management, and then they gave back the property to the national trustee after 3 months. This three months costed nearly HUF 10 million to the ORO. Szolnok is the home of Florian Farkas, former President of ORO, and the organization called Bridge to the World of Work Employment Cooperative presided by Farkas is registered in the town as well. The Ministry established HUF 270 million irregularities in the entity.

Among the debts inherited from Farkas, the Roma Self-Government has several items of which you cannot know what their fate was. It is suspected that the same wage payment was accounted in more places, once at the expense of the state aids, once of the EU programs.

According to index.hu, the management under Florian Farkas is not easy to reconstruct, because internal mechanisms necessary for transparent management did not operate within the ORO. It was also supported by the investigation of the National Audit Office (ASZ) published in September.

The ASZ report confirms that practically, Florian Farkas led the organization in one person; he did not enable others to oversee the cash flow, outside his narrow environment. On the fate of the ORO properties, he illegally decided alone without the authorization of the general meeting, as well as on many other cases.

Farkas himself decided on 10% of the ORO’s operating budget. According to the Audit Office, he irregularly paid individuals for three times for tasks which “were consistent with national self-governmental duties”.

President of ORO, Istvan Hegedus says all abuses happened under the former President and his people.

Hegedus has been President for almost a year, his relationship with Farkas was quite good at the beginning, Farkas and his people still had a huge influence. According to some deputies, Hegedus was only a puppet, he did not have a say in important things. However, after suspicious spending of money turned out, Hegedus also said Farkas should disappear from public life because he only hurts the Roma.

Farkas wanted to make Hegedus fail and he tried to convince the representatives to support him. He promised them assignments worth hundreds of thousands of forints, but he could not show them actual contracts, thus the deputies went home disappointedly.

based on the article of index.hu
translated by BA

Photo: MTI

Source: http://index.hu