Anita Orbán, the foreign minister, has filed a criminal complaint concerning purchases related to ventilators purchased during the coronavirus pandemic under the previous Orbán government.
Brutal amount of money spent
The complaint concerns purchases made in March and April 2020, worth a total 300 billion forints (EUR 827m) by the previous foreign ministry led by Péter Szijjártó, Orbán said, adding that the purchases had been made outside the public procurement system.
The documents reviewed so far have raised “suspicion of embezzlement causing extreme damage and other crimes … suggesting the responsibility of top management” at the previous ministry, Orbán said, adding that the procurement had mostly targeted ventilators.
The ministry has established that its predecessor had “overpurchased“, buying too many equipment, while there was “a significant difference between purchase and producer prices”, she said.
Lack of staff was the bottleneck, not the number of vetilators
The minister noted that an invasive ventilator requires an ICU specialist, a qualified nurse, oxygen supply, and an ICU bed, which at the time of the pandemic limited the number of patients in intensive care to between 800-2,000. “The bottleneck was not the restricted number of ventilators … despite that fact, the decision makers considered the number of ventilators as an indicator of the full capacity,” she said, adding that “at the height of the epidemic only 2,500 ventilators had been sent to the hospitals, the vast majority of the stock is still in a warehouse.“
As for the purchase price of the equipment, the difference from the producer price was 13.4 billion forints in the case of six companies, she said. Quoting press reports, she said the average price of a ventilator was 17 million forints, while producers sold the same models between 1,000 and 5,000 US dollars (348,000-1.3m forints).
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Szijjártó tried to hide important details
According to the minister, the previous ministry had left behind “incomplete documentation” but added that the original documents “could not be fully erased and a lot of them could be restored, which provided a better image of what happened.” She added that her ministry’s staff had managed to restore 130,000 files concerning the procurement.
According to information from the ministry, its predecessor had purchased 16,853 ventilators, protective gear, PCR tests, and medicines in spring 2020, under the previous government’s “special legal order” introduced at the beginning of the pandemic.
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