Until very recently the Hungarian media had left politicians’ private lives alone. In the last few months, however, there has been a decided change in attitude. I think it was 888.hu, a government-inspired internet site that was supposed to be hip and capture the imagination of the younger generation of right-wingers, that broke with this hands-off policy. The editor-in-chief, the notorious Gábor G. Fodor of Nézőpont Intézet, decided to publish nude photos of the wife of MSZP party chairman József Tóbiás. A few weeks later Ripost.hu, also a government-sponsored tabloid site, came out with a juicy story about János Volner, a Jobbik MP, who was found behind some bushes with a woman friend in Pécel, a suburb of Budapest. What the two were doing in the bushes was widely discussed at the time, especially in the pro-government media. So, thanks to the newly created pro-government tabloids, the taboo has been broken.
The story of György Matolcsy’s divorce and his liaison with a 31-year-old woman, Zita Vajda, has been garnering a lot of attention. The media isn’t interested in their romantic attachment. Rather, they view the story as further proof of the incredible corruption that surrounds the Hungarian National Bank (MNB) under the leadership of György Matolcsy.
Regular readers of Hungarian Spectrum are only too familiar with Matolcsy’s generosity toward his friends and family—and his family is large since there are a lot of Matolcsys. He is especially generous toward his lover, for whom he is divorcing his wife of thirty years. In fact, Matolcsy is taking care of Zita’s mother as well. It is easy to be generous with someone else’s money, especially when that money comes straight from Hungary’s central bank. Matolcsy has a track record of using bank funds for questionable purposes. The bank bought some very expensive real estate, and it transferred an incredible amount of public money from the bank to private foundations it set up, which I described as a perfect money laundering device.
Népszabadság stumbled upon the case of Matolcsy’s liaison with Zita Vajda by accident. What the paper was investigating was her fabulously high salary. She was making more money than a department head, and her job was merely to prepare and organize Matolcsy’s foreign travel and negotiations. When Matolcsy became chairman of the central bank in 2013, he fired a number of staff members, including well-qualified economists, and replaced them with his favorite associates from the ministry of the national economy. Zita Vajda was among them. Vajda’s very high salary (1,730,000 ft.) was undoubtedly the subject of gossip, and I assume that one of the employees convinced Népszabadság to investigate. It took a little while because the bank tried to stall, but eventually the paper got the information with the following sentence tacked on at the end: “György Matolcsy’s personal life and his divorce is a private matter.” Was this a mistake or was the information about his divorce, which was not publicly known, intentionally leaked? I don’t know, but it supplied another incentive to pursue the matter. And the deeper Népszabadság dug, the more dirt it uncovered.
In addition to her job at the bank, in 2014 Zita Vajda was made a board member of the bank’s Pallas Athene Domus Innovationis (PADI) foundation. A year later she became a member of the board of a corporation created by the same PADI. Népszabadság calculates that the salary of a board member of one of these foundations is 555,000 ft./month. Soon enough it became known that Zita Vajda’s mother, Mrs. Péter Vajda, an employee of a public accounting firm, takes care of the accounts of all six foundations. The company, thanks to Zita Vajda’s relationship to Matolcsy, received approximately 27 million forints from the foundations in 2015 alone. The company’s total revenue that year was only 62 million forints. Thus, almost half of the public accounting firm’s revenue came from the bank’s foundations.
Just to keep the record straight, Zita Vajda no longer works for the bank. I guess it was deemed advisable to remove her from the limelight because of the divorce and impending marriage. Ripost recently reported that the Matolcsys separated months ago and that divorce papers had already been filed. After Vajda’s departure from the bank, Matolcsy made sure that she would not suffer any financial loss. Thus, in addition to her two board member jobs, she became deputy director of the Pallas Athene Geopolitikai Alapítvány (PAGEO) and also a “researcher” in the PAGEO Research Institute. Her income from these two new jobs amounts to 1.2 million ft. /month, which doesn’t quite match the money she made at the bank. But if you add up her income from the four different sources, her salary may be as high as 2.3 million forints a month.
Of these four jobs the most intriguing is her “research position” at PAGEO to the tune of 600,000 ft. /month. As far as we know, she spent two months in India where she studied yoga. In fact, in her spare time as “international secretary” to Matolcsy, she gave yoga lessons to interested bank employees. Her knowledge of India certainly doesn’t merit 600,000 ft. per month. The top expert on India, a university professor, makes only 380,000 ft. Népszabadság discovered one short article online that she wrote about Dharavit, one of the largest slums in Mumbai. But she is no India expert. The job was created for her because of her relationship to Matolcsy. After all, the happy new couple will need plenty of money to maintain a life style becoming the Hungarian central bank chairman and his wife.
Clik here to view.
The lady may be talented–in yoga
Matolcsy, we know, is attracted to certain Eastern beliefs/superstitions. For instance, it seems that Matolcsy believes in the ill effects of certain numbers. The number 8 has ominous consequences, and therefore he changed the official address of the bank from Szabadság tér 8-9 to Szabadság tér 9. People claim that certain rooms inside the building had to be renumbered to avoid the number 8.
Another hypothesis that’s floating about in Budapest is that Hungary’s central bank is run by a man who accepts the Tibetan Buddhist belief that there are four days in the year when positive or negative actions can be multiplied ten million times. The best description I could find of this belief came from the Kopan Monastery in Nepal. Since these days are calculated on the basis of the lunar calendar, the dates vary from year to year.
Upon hearing stories about Matolcsy and the Buddhist ten-million multiplier days, the journalists at Népszabadság began checking the calendar of important bank announcements and came to the conclusion that there might be something to the story. The article correlated these special days with important bank announcements. It is hard to know, without going over all the important decisions that have been made in the last three years, whether there is any truth to this hypothesis. I did check the dates to ascertain what day of the week we are talking about, and I found two announcements that had been made on Saturday, an odd day to pick.
Clik here to view.
Buddha statue from Sarnath / 4th century
Soon after the article on the strange happenings in the central bank was published, the bank’s spokesman denied the allegations and called it absurd, pointing out that since March 2013 the Hungarian National Bank has published 818 news bulletins and 455 publications. Therefore there has been hardly a day when the bank didn’t make some kind of a statement. Yes, the hypothesis may sound strange, but by now one can imagine almost anything about the affairs of the bank under the leadership of Matolcsy, who some years ago claimed that all Hungarian children, just like the Japanese, are born with a red spot on their fannies which, of course, was nonsense.
In the wake of the revelations of Népszabadság, the pro-government papers have been silent. Matolcsy and his girlfriend have disappeared from sight, and Zita shut down her yoga blog in a great hurry. The supervisory board headed by a Fidesz politician claims that it has no jurisdiction over Zita Vajda’s salary. We can be pretty sure that everything will go on as if it nothing happened in MNB, which the author of an editorial renamed Magyar Nemzeti Budoár (Hungarian National Boudoir). Another editorial, which appeared in Magyar Nemzet titled “Sötét verem” (Dark pit), emphasized that although the paper is not fond of tabloid stories and the romance between Zita Vajda and György Matolcsy is a private matter, there are times when a love affair loses its private quality. This happens when public money is involved. According to the author, “Matolcsy for a very long time has owed the public an explanation of his sundry questionable affairs.” And if he misses the opportunity to do so, “he shouldn’t be surprised if many people think that love is not only a dark pit but might also hide corruption.”
Perhaps the best line came from Zoltán Bodnár, former deputy chairman of the central bank, who has a good sense of humor. At the time of the upheaval over the establishment of private foundations by the Hungarian National Bank, Matolcsy steadfastly maintained that with the transfer of the money to private foundations “it had lost its public character.” So, when a few days ago a reporter asked Bodnár what he thought about the national bank under Matolcsy, Bodnár quipped: “it has lost its character as a central bank.”