The head of the Fehergyarmat prosecutor's office has been arrested under suspicion of bribery in an investigation that has been partially classified a state secret. It has been decades since such a high-ranking justice official has ended up behind bars.
Eastern Hungary has been known for some time for the frequency of its serious investigations into justice officials. Several officials from the Central Prosecutor's Investigative Office have already been the subject of investigation, the latest of whom is Istvan Angyal, who has been running the prosecutor's office in Fehergyarmat for fifteen years.
He is more than a suspect: the Buda Central District Court has ordered thirty days of preliminary detention for Angyal. Last year, a Berci Santa, a Fehergyarmat businessman, gave HUF100,000 to Angyal last year. Local prosecutors began an investigation into the businessman and five of his partners on grounds of fraud. The trial was concluded this May. Before the lower court issued its judgement, the prosecutor's office made a surprisingly generous offer: Santa should be acquitted for lack of evidence. This was rejected by the Fehergyarmat Court. The County Court upheld this decision and sentenced the businessman to a one-year suspended sentence.
The prosecutor's investigators claim the businessman gave Angyal the money in order to bribe him. Laszlo Hajzer, Angyal's defence lawyer, said the payment had a different purpose: Angyal had sold a HUF500,000 property to Santa, and the money was an advance on the payment. Imre Keresztes, head of the Central Prosecutor's Investigative Office, told HVG that proceedings had a long way to run. The official secrecy only concerned the methods used in the cause of the investigation. He added that Angyal had been arrested in order to prevent him from derailing the investigation by influencing witnesses. The official secrecy would be lifted in due course, he said.
Hajzer showed considerable, and understandable, empathy for the local prosecutors involved. He had also worked as a prosecutor before becoming police chief of Szabolc-Szatmar-Bereg county. He resigned after facing groundless accusations of abusing his office, after which he began work as a lawyer, before going into politics under the Fidesz banner. Though he failed to win a seat in the recent elections, he was able to notch up a major victory this week, when a lower court sentenced Miklos Pasztor, a former Nyiregyhaza police chief, to pay a fine of HUF60,000. His investigation did not begin too discretely either: he was handcuffed, taken into custody, and then accused only of behaving "too respectfully" towards a local right-wing councillor, who was loudly complaining about the police while withdrawing cash from a machine that happened to be opposite the police station.
Gergely Fahidi
