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Továbbküldöm
MegosztomZoltan Illes, head of Fidesz's Terezvaros branch, and a professor in the environmental protection department at the Central European University, has brought a private prosecution against Terezvaros district council. Illes and his partner in the private prosecution, Zsofia Hassay, said at a joint press conference that "there are much more suspect property transactions in the sixth district than in the seventh district, and there is a suspicion that there was an attempt to cover this up." We asked Zoltan Illes for his opinion of the affair.
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hvg.hu: Wasn't your criticism of Terezvaros council excessive? Can you provide concrete proof?
Zoltán Illés: I'll repeat: Terezvaros has not had a good reputation for a long time because of its scandalous real estate transactions. There have been a whole series of inexplicable property sales, which have scandalised half the country. Many palaces on Andrassy ut were sold in this way, as was the former Ballet Institute. But then there was the sale of a shopfront at 61 Bajcsy-Zsilinszky ut, and the bribery that was linked to it - in this case there was a prosecution and imprisonment.
hvg.hu: That's a pretty frank thing to say. It's hardly a surprise that they're suing you.
I.Z.: One minister tried to spread rumours when he would have done better to solve the problem rather than try and cover things up. The politician in question is Miklos Persanyi, who was talking about pollution at a Csepel rubber factory. He said there was no pollution and that it was unnecessary to scare people with stories like that. His successor, Gabor Fodor, disagreed, saying I was right. He said there had been a risk that they had dealt with. "We should congratulate Zoltan Illes for drawing our attention to this," he said. Istvan Verok could learn from this example, perhaps by realising that people who draw attention to abuses shouldn't be reported but that the relevant lessons should be learned to stop the original abuses from being repeated. If certain Terezvaros councillors had refrained from stealing, they wouldn't now be under suspicion. Of course, this is now a problem for the law enforcement authorities to deal with.
hvg.hu: Let's stick to one concrete story, that of the shopfront at Bajcsy-Zsinlinszy ut 61. It's former tenant, the director of MUART Press, Karoly Berecz, reported the council, saying that one of its staff had asked him for a Ft18m bribe to sell the space. Didn't opposition councillors know about this? And if they did, why didn't they do anything about it?
I.Z.: It's good that you mentioned this, because I've been sued in connection with this affair because I mixed two people's names up on a TV show. I said Peter Kovacs, then head of the council's property management company, took bribes, when in fact it was Karoly Juhasz, a businessman, who was caught by the National Investigations Office in January 2008. Given the fact that the police arrested both people, my mistake can be forgiven. The recordings obtained by the Investigations Office show that somebody asked for the Ft18m in bribe money in exchange for arranging the sale of Bajcsy-Zsilinszky ut 61.
