Cast an eye over the international press. Cast your eye looking for something, anything which contains the following two words; ‘corruption’ and ‘Hungary’. What do you think you’ll find?
One of the first articles to pop up on my screen was a piece featuring a former Belgian prime minister. Now, how many Belgians can you name? How many prime ministers? Former or incumbent. The only famous Belgians I can think of are the one-time Jean-Phillipe Léo Smet, known as Johnny Hallyday, and Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone. In fact, Johnny Hallyday doesn’t really count as he was half Belgian and half French. But there is one Belgian who makes his living by releasing outrageous soundbites that attack Hungary, and he is one of the most recognisable Belgians around, at least if you’re Hungarian. Doubly so if you’re a Hungarian dentist.
Guy Verhofstadt, a man whose parents obviously had a superstitious fear of dentistry, something they then instilled in him, perennially lashes out at Viktor Orbán, accusing him of corruption.
The sun rises, the sun sets, the seasons change, but not Verhofstadt.
This is a man who, having plied a trade of sorts in Belgian politics, was kicked upstairs to spend time relaxing in the EU, making outrageous accusations, and scaring young and old alike with his spectacular shipwreck of teeth.
According to him, in Hungary, the colour of corruption is the colour of orange, the orange colour of Fidesz.
Verhofstadt is a man, who, let’s face it, has a bit of an obsession when it comes to our chosen Prime Minister and his government. Foolishly, he’s allowed that obsession to cloud his view of anything connected to Hungary. To Verhofstadt’s twisted mind, everything bad in Hungary is coloured orange. According to the tooth fairy, anything bad that happens, especially cases of corruption are exclusively the responsibility of Orbán and Fidesz. At the risk of scarring Verhofstadt for life with the introduction of the truth at this late stage of his life, I can’t let that pass without comment. Corruption is nothing other than a form of human conduct. There are as many scruples as there are people, and it’s nothing short of shockingly disingenuous for Verhofstadt to arrogantly assert that which is false.
Verhofstadt dares to claim that Hungary is in the hands of corrupt people, but if he were to remove his blinkers, he might actually learn something.
The greatest corruption scandal in Hungary of recent years, the Alstom affair, in which the French company paid bribes in order to influence the outcome of a tender for metro trains, happened when the socialists and liberals, so beloved of idiots like Verhofstadt, were the people with their hands in the till.
That was one corruption case tied to the former mayor of Budapest, Gábor Demszky
whose apparent descent into dementia of late may well prevent the truth from ever truly emerging.
Once again it was Demszky and the socialist-liberal government of the time who were in charge when the disastrous, scandalous fiasco regarding the construction of Metro line 4 occurred. OLAF (the EU Anti-Fraud Office) calculated that 60% of the funds were affected by irregular contracts, and that as a result the capital city and the country were robbed of just shy of HUF 167 billion forints.
HUF 167 billion. That’s a huge number. At today’s exchange rate, that’s the equivalent of EUR 457,914,000!
And yet there’s not been a peep from Verhofstadt or his like about this finding of OLAF which relates, in part, to a contract with Siemens.
Here is the biggest case of corruption recorded in recent times in Hungary, one concerning a French company, the other a German company, but for Verhofstadt the only corruption that exists in Hungary is directly linked to his political enemy, Orbán.
Cases of corruption will always exist, and sadly, it would be foolish of us to expect any change from Guy ‘the tooth fairy’ Verhofstadt regarding his habit of slandering those who happen to see the truth about him: that he’s a deranged fool with bad teeth rather than the cool, stylish Ché-wannabe he obviously sees reflected in the mirror.
It was the Fidesz government which was obliged to stump up the cash to finish the Metro 4 project, the stolen money having been reclaimed by the EU as a result of misuse of EU funds, but Verhofstadt seems to have not heard that fact.
For the same reason I’m going to go on record here and state that I expect a veil of silence to float between the vast gap to be found in Verhofstadt’s front teeth regarding the latest news of corruption related to Hungary. Guess why? Yes, that’s right – once again, it’s connected not to Fidesz, not to Orbán, but to the Leftwaffe and the liberals that comprise Verhofstadt’s Hungarian allies. Last year, a tender to rent buses to the capital’s public transport company BKK worth approximately HUF 350 million was awarded to an off-shore company. The company in question doesn’t even feature bus-rental in its profile, for God’s sake! The company should have been disqualified from the start as a result of being an off-shore company, to say nothing of the fact that the company was only registered a few days before the tender closed. Further, the company concerned is an asset management company, with no connections to transport.
But, given that the tender was awarded by the capital’s own minor mayor, the useless Gergely Karácsony, we can expect Verhofstadt to remain tight-lipped about this latest example of Hungarian corruption. Neither should we expect the tooth fairy to comment on the fact that one of Karácsony’s many deputies, the socialist Katalin Tüttő’s former partner is connected to the winning company.
I confidently predict that this time around, the EU’s pet tooth fairy will detect no problems and not a whiff of corruption when he learns that the winning company not only has no buses, but also no employees. In essence the company only possesses two things: the plans they submitted which were stolen from another company involved in the tender, oh, and the corruptly obtained cash they got from ‘winning’ the contract, of course.
