Vilmos Vályi-Nagy, a former state secretary in Viktor Orbán’s government between 2010 and 2014 and one of investigative journalism’s most relied-upon informants over the past decade, has broken his silence in an interview with Partizan. Published on Wednesday, the wide-ranging conversation covers the former interior minister Sándor Pintér, István Tiborcz, the prime minister’s son-in-law, as well as the Microsoft procurement scandal and the long-dormant Eclipse affair.
A whistleblower steps forward
Partizán said on its YouTube channel on Wednesday evening that Vályi-Nagy, whom it described as perhaps the single most helpful source to the media in serious cases, had approached the outlet himself to tell his story on the record, face and name included, the Hungarian News Agency wrote.
Vályi-Nagy began his career at the tax and customs authority’s predecessor, the National Command of the Customs and Finance Guard (VPOP), first as IT director and later as deputy chief commander. At the National Development Ministry from 2010, initially as deputy state secretary and from 2012 as state secretary, his principal brief was to extend the VPOP’s procurement and IT practices across the entire state sector.
The Microsoft row
At one point, the state secretary met resistance to his drive to rationalise government IT, including from Microsoft, which the programme said was unhappy at the prospect of shrinking state orders. In 2019, OLAF, the European anti-fraud office, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission uncovered that Microsoft resellers had made huge sums through corrupt public procurement of the company’s software in dealings with the Hungarian state. Intermediary companies negotiated down the price of bulk-bought Office licences and “pocketed” the discount; Microsoft was fined in the United States, but no one was held to account in Hungary, the programme said.
Vályi-Nagy said that as early as 2011, alongside cutting licence fees, his team had been working to introduce open-source software across public administration. He alleged that János Lázár, “without our knowledge, support or approval”, reallocated billions of forints from an IT project to buy Microsoft licences. The licence package, he said, was almost twice the market rate; after his intervention the public procurement procedure was cancelled, saving the state one billion forints.
“You will pay a heavy price”
Valyi-Nagy said this was the first time he felt he had hurt a powerful interest. According to his account, Ferenc Vágujhelyi, then deputy head of the tax authority, told him he would “pay a heavy price”. The prime minister later affirmed that he had done the right thing, he said, but as a consequence he was given no role in the new government formed in 2014. He suspected that Humansoft, the IT company that lost out when the deal was scrapped, had manoeuvred to have him pushed out.
The accusation levelled at him was that he had taken 50 million forints in the Microsoft case. The decision, he said, was taken at a lunch with the Orbán family, and István Tiborcz, the prime minister’s son-in-law, fed information to the public. Later in the programme it emerged that he had subsequently learned from Zsuzsanna Németh, the development minister, that “István Tiborcz had lobbied Orbán”.
During his time as state secretary, numerous other state secretaries, institution heads and even ministers contacted him to complain about “unbearable” family members and oligarchs who were “bleeding the Hungarian state dry”, and who “knew exactly what was going on, but either did not dare, or were unable, or did not want to do anything about it”, he said.
The Eclipse affair and fallout
The programme also examined the Eclipse affair, in which the state spent billions developing software to record the authenticity of cars that was never delivered. Valyi-Nagy said he had come into conflict with Sándor Pintér, the interior minister, over the Eclipse case.From 2014 onwards, he said, he was under surveillance for a long period, received threats, and false data about him were recorded in the files of the Constitutional Protection Office.
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After the Eclipse affair, “dozens were fired” at VPOP who had worked on the case, and such punishments had been a recurring element of Fidesz’s personnel policy since 2010, he added.“I have seen many ministerial changes where, after the minister was fired, the state secretaries, deputies, department heads and their people were sacked to the last man … this has happened even in the last two years, in connection with the restructuring and merger of the finance ministry and the economy ministry,” he said.
Check out the full interview below:
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