After considerable effort on the part of the opposition parties, Gergely Gulyás, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s chief of staff, released the Hungarian government’s contract for the purchase of the Chinese vaccine, which, bizarrely, he posted on his own Facebook page. Perhaps I’m just an unusually suspicious sort, but as soon as I saw that the contract for five million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine was signed not by the National Center of Public Health (NKK) and Sinopharm International Hong Kong Limited but by NKK and Danubia Pharma, a Hungarian drug wholesaler, I was wary. Danubia’s representative was a certain Máté Tuza, and since the deal was an entirely domestic affair, not surprisingly the contract was written in Hungarian.
My very first thought was that this deal, like so many others that have anything to do with the Orbán government, was probably not quite on the up and up. If all of the transactions between buyer and seller were taking place in Budapest, what on earth did Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó do during his many trips to Beijing? At the time, he bragged about his successful negotiations to receive the much-needed vaccine from Sinopharm, which made it seem as if the Hungarian government would be doing business directly with the Chinese vaccine company.
The New York Times article that was published shortly after the release of the contract focused on the exorbitant price of Sinopharm’s product: €30 or $36 for a single dose of the two-dose regimen. The European Union pays €15.50 for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and only $2.15 for AstraZeneca. Since, in the case of Hungary, we are talking about the purchase of five million doses of the Chinese vaccine, the total price was €150 million, or 55 billion forints.
It was also quickly discovered that the ownership of Danubia Pharma, which was founded as a small drug wholesaler company in 2009, suddenly changed hands on November 27, 2020, only two months before the Chinese deal was signed by Danubia and NKK. Prior to the recent ownership change, Danubia was owned by Norbert Lachmann, who sold it to a company called Syntonite Med Zrt., which was established on the very same day that it purchased Danubia. Clearly, Syntonite was created for the sole purpose of serving as the middleman between Sinopharm and the Hungarian government.
Who the true owners of Danubia/Syntonite Med are is not known, but there have been two managing directors since Syntonite bought Danubia, first a certain József Kovács and then Máté Tuza, a man in his late thirties who signed the contract. What Danubia’s profit margin is on this deal we again don’t know, but even if Danubia charges only one dollar per dose, it would bring in $5 million for a company “with a registered capital of €9,000 or $10,700.” But Ákos Hadházy, who has spent years uncovering these government corruption cases, wouldn’t be surprised if half of the purchase price ended up in Danubia’s coffers because “these repackaging companies always double the original price.” If Hadházy’s guess is correct, Danubia or whoever is behind it might have pocketed €75 million.
As is usually the case in Orbán’s Hungary, this is not the end of the story. Danubia over the years had many “owners,” among them a British company called Independent Invest Ltd., whose business was handled by two Hungarian lawyers, Béla Vámosi and Márk Mihály Szeverényi. Independent Invest at one point established a Hungarian company, the Pannon Cargo and Speed Trans Logisztikai és Szállítmányozási Kft., which “out of nowhere” got the job of handling the shipment of the Chinese ventilators in 2020 and was paid $19.5 million for its efforts. Independent Invest was the “owner” of Pannon Cargo just long enough to transact the deal, at which point it disappeared into thin air.
But Danubia’s tarnished past doesn’t end here. Márton Tompos, a Momentum politician who is on the trail of corrupt politicians, discovered that the very first “owner” of Danubia was Batavia Investments Ltd., an off-shore company registered in Vanuatu, whose agent on the island was GT Group Limited. GT in this case stands for Geoffrey Taylor, “the off-shore king” who has been involved in arms shipments from North Korea to Iran, has laundered billions for Mexican drug lords, and was responsible for Russia’s biggest tax fraud. The two Hungarian lawyers involved in Pannon Cargo also had plenty of business dealings with “Sir Geoffrey Taylor.” I should add that Márk Szeverényi happens to be the brother-in-law of Dr. László Szabó, who for a while served as Hungary’s ambassador in Washington. According to an investigative article by András Bódis, Szabó’s abrupt departure from Washington coincided with the shipment of thousands of overpriced and unnecessary Chinese ventilators. Tompos figures that the link between the Hungarian “businessmen” or perhaps even the Orbán government and Geoffrey Taylor was László György Kiss from Romania, who is often referred to as the “offshore master.” He was convicted of money laundering and is currently serving time in a Romanian jail.
I’m sure that the journalists and politicians who tried to find out more about these cases only scratched the surface. But even so, I think it is pretty clear that the Hungarian government has extensive dealings with criminal elements who most likely specialize in money laundering worldwide.