Péter Magyar’s candidate for powerful new prosecution agency named – and the strongest criticism levelled at her

The National Assembly’s Justice and Constitutional Affairs Committee has nominated Anna Róza Unger to head the National Office for the Recovery and Protection of National Assets (NVVH). The NVVH is Hungary’s new, almighty prosecution agency entrusted to protect public assets and to trace and recover state property that has been unlawfully managed, misappropriated, or used.

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At its meeting on Thursday, the committee also nominated Katalin Tasnádi as deputy head responsible for investigations. However, following the hearings, it declared the application process for the deputy head responsible for public finances unsuccessful, MTI wrote.

After Unger’s hearing, political analyst Gábor Török wrote that she was “a theoretical expert removed from the practical realities of the subject” who, “as before, essentially started from the premise that Hungary was governed by a dictatorship – an authoritarian system – before 2026, and regards preventing their return as a central political objective”.

Unger is a political scientist by training, a lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and a corruption researcher who has studied the subject extensively over the past decade. Her specialist fields include electoral systems and the functioning of democratic institutions. That means Unger is not a legal expert although she will lead Hungary’s exceptionally powerful prosecution agency.

Parliament will decide on the nominee at Friday’s sitting, although the vote is now little more than a formality: Tisza has 141 MPs in the 199-member chamber. Fidesz, the largest opposition party, is not taking part in the selection process.

No final verdicts any time soon

At an earlier hearing before a parliamentary committee, Unger dismissed as nonsense the suggestion that final, legally binding verdicts would be delivered in cases uncovered by the new institution during its future leader’s first six-year term.

She told the Justice and Constitutional Affairs Committee that six years would be enough to uncover “down to the last nail” what had happened in Hungary, MTI wrote.

She explained that this would provide sufficient time to launch proceedings and bring every person responsible before the courts, “whether they are powerful or insignificant, from Budapest or the countryside”. This would include both those who committed the offences and those who allowed them to be committed, she said, adding that Hungarian society must finally understand and learn what had happened so that it could never happen again.

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She wants to map the entire corruption structure

Unger stressed that the National Office for the Recovery and Protection of National Assets would not be tasked merely with uncovering individual corruption cases. Its purpose, she said, would be to map the system that had created and sustained corruption, and to show how it had operated, so that the “newly emerging Hungarian democracy” could develop an immune system capable of making a recurrence impossible once the country had been consolidated.

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Individual corruption cases can also be uncovered by the Integrity Authority, the prosecution service and the police, while the Hungarian Competition Authority and the State Audit Office can raise the alarm. But the system itself must be “pieced together”; “they put it together once”, and now it was time for “us to put it together too, and make Hungarian voters understand” what had happened, she said.

New prosecution agency’s structure presented

She indicated that the office would initially employ roughly 150 people. Each of the four deputy heads would oversee a quasi-directorate, with investigative work expected to require the greatest number of staff, she said.

She also stressed that, once the office had been established, it would need to review as quickly as possible high-value state contracts signed less than a year earlier, since these could still be challenged.

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