Brokerage scandal – Left-wing, liberal parties hold anti-govt demo

Budapest, April 11 (MTI) – Hundreds of protesters gathered in downtown Budapest on Saturday for a demonstration organised by left-wing and liberal parties in support of victims of the bankruptcy of the Quaestor brokerage firm.

Speakers demanded that an early election should be called, the government should resign and those involved in the scandal should be brought to court.

The protest was addressed by politicians of the Socialist Party, the Democratic Coalition (DK), the Dialogue for Hungary (PM) party and the Hungarian Liberal Party (MLP) as well as some victims of Quaestor’s bankruptcy.

Socialist deputy leader Zoltan Lukacs said that “hundreds of thousands of people on disability or service pension, pensioners who benefited from early retirement, broken tobacconists, entrepreneurs, people deprived of their private pension savings and tens of thousand stranded Quaestor investors” are all victims of Viktor Orban’s regime.

DK Board member Szabolcs Kerek-Barczy said that Quaestor owner Csaba Tarsoly was only a “small-town front man as compared to the true gangsters sitting in the government and the gangleader who had only informed his cronies about the bankruptcy in advance.” Kerek-Barczy urged early elections.

Zoltan Bodnar of MLP said that the “greedy Fidesz state had ‘swallowed’ everything but failed to notice that a ‘friendly’ company had stolen 150 billion forints from common people.”

Bence Tordai, spokesman of the PM party, said the current regime is based on oligarchs stealing the money of ordinary people. “In a normal country, such oligarchs have been put behind bars,” he said.