At the beginning of August, in connection with a Coca-Cola ad depicting two young men in a clearly romantic posture, I had the opportunity to introduce István Boldog, a Fidesz member of parliament from Mezőtúr, Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County, who took exception to the message Coca-Cola of Hungary was trying to convey. He was the man who announced a boycott of the soft drink.
Boldog is an uneducated man, an agricultural mechanic who for 20 years prior to 2010 was mayor of “his beloved village” Kétpó, population 820. Two issues rouse him. One is homosexuality. This summer, for example, he rose in parliament and demanded the prohibition of the annual gay march called Budapest Pride. Instead, he called for more national rock bands. His other issue is the Treaty of Trianon and Greater Hungary, which he would clearly like to restore. Or, at least this is what one must conclude after finding the text of the so-called Hungarian Creed at the end of the autobiography he submitted to parliament. Boldog doesn’t grasp the real meaning of the National Creed and doesn’t realize that Hungary forever renounced any territorial claims against its neighbors. In my post I described him as a “simpleton who is just wandering around in a world he doesn’t understand.”
Well, I was wrong. It turns out that he had enough brains to organize and execute a very profitable corruption scheme. Boldog is not yet in jail, but I suspect he will be soon because four of his associates are already in pre-trial detention and a fifth is in home confinement.
A few months after I sketched my portrait of Boldog, Ákos Hadházy revealed at one of his corruption infos that Boldog and his circle of Fidesz politicians were all involved in a corruption scheme and were already under investigation. That was in October. Péter Polt, the chief prosecutor, confirmed that his organization was investigating the case. It looks as if, under pressure from Brussels to investigate corruption cases, the Orbán government decided to throw a few of their own under the bus. Boldog is the perfect sacrificial lamb. He doesn’t belong to the inner circle of Fidesz, and he can even sometimes be an embarrassment to the party. Viktor Orbán admitted in parliament today that corruption has penetrated Fidesz, prompting 24.hu to write that “the ice was broken.” Perhaps, but Fidesz will make sure that the faces of corruption are far removed from the prime minister.
Naturally, in the Boldog case, the money that was neatly apportioned between politicians and businessmen came from the European Union, specifically from the Territorial and Settlement Development Operational Program, which is designed to help underdeveloped regions like the northern regions of the Great Plains and southern Transdanubia.
The scheme was simple. Boldog called on all the Fidesz mayors and decided, depending on who was willing to “cooperate,” which towns would receive financial support for projects and which ones would not. The mayors were told which companies must do the jobs. They were even told which other companies should submit bids in order to make sure that Boldog’s favorites would be the winners.
István Boldog’s right-hand woman was Petra Fehér, a 37-year-old Fidesz member of the Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County Council. She, like so many of her generation, began her political career in Fidelitas, but her career really soared after she linked up with István Boldog sometime in 2014. Her connection to the MP was so close that people called her “Boldog’s catchpole.”
István Boldog and Petra Fehér on August 20, 2019
In addition to Fehér, three more individuals were also detained. They were the heads of companies that were the beneficiaries of Boldog’s scheme with the mayors. The preferred companies experienced tremendous growth after they hooked up with Boldog. Boldog as well as Fehér received kickbacks from the companies and most likely from the mayors as well.
Fehér’s assigned job was to supervise the Territorial and Settlement Development Operational Funds, but, according to the prosecutors, in several cases she received illegal benefits of her own. In brief, she is accused of taking kickbacks. It was Fehér who ordered the mayors to visit Boldog at the town hall of Kétpó, where Boldog still lives. Fehér took their cell phones away before the Fidesz MP talked to them individually about the conditions of financial support for their projects. There were times when the mayors had to meet Boldog in the thermal bath of a nearby town where, in bathing trunks and without phones, they could talk about the tenders “which would be beneficial to everybody.” Apparently, nothing was left to chance. All of the detailed instructions from Boldog and Fehér, from planning to implementation, had to be carefully followed. According to Tamás Csányi, a Jobbik member of parliament from the same county, Boldog sent out the “planners,” whose job was to submit overpriced estimates for the project, and later a “táskás embere” (a man with a bag into which the money had to be put) appeared on the scene to collect his share.
By the way, as a manifestation of his fascination with pre-Trianon Hungary, one of Boldog’s favorite companies was entrusted with constructing a “memorial park in the shape of Greater Hungary”in Kétpó where he held secret meetings with mayors, naturally stripped of their cell phones.
We will see whether the Orbán regime is at all serious about investigating some of the most egregious corruption cases committed on the lower level of the party. Will they be satisfied with sending Petra Fehér and her associates to jail or they will also go after István Boldog? If the descriptions of Boldog’s modus operandi are correct, I see no way of keeping the MP out of jail.