Budapest, March 9 (MTI) – An investigation into the Buda-Cash brokerage scandal should also examine the role of the central bank, former finance minister Janos Veres said.
Veres said that “deficient” regulatory oversight by the central bank under the governing Fidesz party and the bank’s governor Gyorgy Matolcsy had allowed funds of more than 100,000 clients to disappear. Two-thirds of the losses were incurred by banks that received their licences after the supervisory authority PSZAF was merged with the National Bank of Hungary (NBH), he said.
Veres said that an amendment passed in 2009 mandating screenings of financial organisations at least every five years had been a tightening rather than a loosening of the law which actually called for more frequent screenings. He added that Fidesz lawmakers at the time had supported the amendment and no changes had been made to it since.
Parliament’s budget committee, which was to have been briefed on the Buda-Cash scandal on Monday took the Buda-Cash item off the agenda. Nine governing-party lawmakers voted in favour of removing the item and 5 opposition lawmakers voted against.
Neither Gyorgy Matolcsy nor Economy Minister Mihaly Varga responded to an invitation to give a briefing at the meeting.
Sandor Burany, (Socialist) head of the budget committee, told reporters before the meeting that the reason why the Buda-Cash scandal was relevant for the committee is that it involved public funds, and compensation would require “heavy payments” from central coffers.
Lajos Szucs, a lawmaker for the Fidesz party, had argued that it was sufficient to address the issue in parliament’s economic committee, where former finance ministers and financial regulators had been invited.
The radical nationalist Jobbik party said the scandal could have been uncovered as early as in 2010 if a motion by Jobbik to make screenings at financial institutions more frequent had been passed, but these motions had been rejected by Fidesz.
Antal Rogan, head of the parliamentary group for Fidesz, said he proposed setting up an ad-hoc parliamentary investigative committee to focus on the Buda-Cash scandal. He said the committee must get to the bottom of several issues, including why parliament, with a Socialist majority, had loosened screening rules of brokerage firms in 2002-2010 and what connections there were between the government of Gordon Bajnai and the executives and owners of Buda-Cash. Another question is how much money had already been missing at Buda-Cash in 2010 at the time of the previous audit. Rogan said results of the investigation should be ready to present to parliament in three months’ time.
