<\/p>\n
As part of our project about the Hungarian wealth declaration system<\/a> we published several stories about the inaccurate declarations of L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Tas\u00f3, a state minister<\/a>. His reaction was unusually aggressive: he threatened with lawsuits, went to the police, made angry statements and questioned the personal integrity of our reporter, Zsuzsanna Wirth. Now she’s telling the inside story of her reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n Of all the politicians that I enraged during my journalistic career, L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Tas\u00f3 was the most infuriated. Once Lajos Bokros (former finance minister) spent minutes shouting at me on the phone, and once I made a powerful politician cry (although I did not mean to). After my article about the shady techniques of Hunvald Gy\u00f6rgy, the former mayor in Erzs\u00e9betv\u00e1ros, angry locals advised me to start publishing recipes in a women\u2019s magazine instead of investigating corruption. But I had never been called a \u2019poorly informed and malicious forger\u2019 and a \u2019paid provocateur,\u2019 all at once. These attributes were in the first reply that Tas\u00f3 sent instead of answering questions. Other emails followed, written in a very similar style.<\/p>\n After I started work at Direkt36 last March, it was my first task to check whether everything was all right with the wealth declarations of Tas\u00f3, a state minister responsible for transport policies. Direkt36 was about to start a new project aiming to uncover the inadequacies of the Hungarian asset declaration system. First, my colleague Anita Vor\u00e1k looked into the declarations of every senior official of the government and she thought Tas\u00f3 would be worth a closer look.<\/p>\n I did not know much about the career of the former mayor of Ny\u00edradony, a city in the rather poor Eastern Hungarian region. Tas\u00f3 was not too active in big politics, unlike, for instance, the mayor of the neighbouring Debrecen, Lajos K\u00f3sa, who is among the most powerful politicians of the governing Fidesz party. Tas\u00f3 was instead busy building a local career during the last two decades, and became as influential in the region as K\u00f3sa. \u2019Here, Tas\u00f3 is like God,\u2019 said a man from Ny\u00edradony, adding that \u2019nothing happens without him here.\u2019 This did not change a bit since Tas\u00f3 has switched mayoralty to a government position in 2014, he claimed.<\/p>\n [vimeo id=”208273777″ align=”center”]<\/p>\n But before traveling to Ny\u00edradony, I started the reporting with gathering every useful information available online: from Tas\u00f3\u2019s CV and website through company records to minutes of Ny\u00edradony\u2019s council meetings. Ninety per cent of the news was about ceremonies where Tas\u00f3 gave speeches. He appeared when a public building was restored in Ny\u00edradony, when a new bicycle road was ready, when a foundation-stone was laid or when medals were handed out. Besides, a few opposition blogs criticised Tas\u00f3\u2019s politics or raised questions about the enrichment of his relatives. But there were no big cases or stories about him. I was surprised to realize that I walked on unexplored territory.<\/p>\n It was surprising because when I visited Ny\u00edradony to research, it turned out that nothing remained unseen in the city. For example, when we sat down to talk, a local lady admitted to have remembered my face from a few hours before, when she had seen me enter a store on the main road. Gossip spreads there like in a village: everybody seemed to know when a local wealthy businessman bought a new Jaguar, or when a luxury apartment in Debrecen was bought by another. Nobody was baffled when talking about powerful citizens getting mysteriously wealthy. Everyone knew how spectacularly successful some Tas\u00f3-family members were. \u2018Have you already seen Tas\u00f3\u2019s castle?,\u2019 they asked without caution. Thus I heard first about the building in Szakolykert, which was rebuilt by public money and then sold to a hunters\u2019 association very close to Tas\u00f3. (Later I published an article about this story.)<\/p>\n After a few weeks, I knew most of the Ny\u00edradony public procurement processes by heart, I knew about the businesses of Tas\u00f3 and his family, and also about his family members and close associates\u2019 getting positions in local public institutions. Also, it was obvious that Tas\u00f3 (measured at least with an Eastern Hungarian merit) gradually became a wealthy man, investing mostly in local lands. I also realized that his wealth declarations were partly inaccurate.<\/p>\n I investigated several leads, and at the end I found a document about one of the council meetings in Ny\u00edradony, which became be the core of my story. It was L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Tas\u00f3 himself who asked the board to change the zoning classification of one of his smaller properties lying in the city outskirts. Nobody raised questions, the vote was unanimous. That\u2019s not strange at all, but considering that I did not find the said parcel in Tas\u00f3\u2019s wealth declarations, that seemed worth a closer look. I looked it up in the land registry: the parcel was indeed owned by Tas\u00f3. I got curious and looked up the neighbouring parcels: they belonged to him, too. He bought some of them back in 2006, and some during the recent years.<\/p>\n It is an abandoned land with nothing interesting around, let alone a billboard saying \u2018Welcome to Ny\u00edradony.\u2019 I got curious about Tas\u00f3\u2019s intentions with these parcels and wondered why he did not declare them (later I realized that in some of his declarations, he did, but in a rather unrecognizable way). I bet he was about to build a hostel or something similar there, because the land lies next to the main road, which was about to be refurbished soon. I found the answer among the public documents of the Ny\u00edradony municipality. It became clear that the city was planning to open an industrial park in the very area, which obviously raised the value of lands lying here. I felt the puzzle was solved.<\/p>\n Of course, writing and fact-checking took more weeks, not to mention contacting everyone involved in the stories. I had to reach Tas\u00f3\u2019s relatives who were mentioned in connection with spending public money, and the state minister himself, before the two articles were finally published in June.<\/p>\n Of all the politicians having irregularities in their wealth declarations we exposed, Tas\u00f3\u2019s reaction was by far the most aggressive. He called the articles a discrediting action, talked about harassment, false and distorted information. \u2018I shall take the necessary legal steps, I have filed a criminal complaint because of the thematic and unscrupulous abuse of my relatives,\u2019 he wrote in a statement. This was not the only one occasion when he threatened with lawsuits. Despite his repeated promises, Tas\u00f3 eventually did not demand any correction of our articles. The Budapest Police launched a harassment investigation based on Tas\u00f3\u2019s charges (against an unknown suspect) but it was closed due to lack of criminal offense. He also started a lawsuit because H\u00edrTV refused to modify their article about the state minister (which was basically a review of the Direkt36 story), but lost the case. Meanwhile, Tas\u00f3 corrected several of his former wealth declarations (in accordance with the irregularities that we uncovered), but did not care to communicate this step in the media.<\/p>\n It is unclear to what extent it was the result of our articles, still, the position of the state minister weakened after our stories had been published. Some of his powers were taken away from him and given to a freshly appointed government commissioner R\u00f3bert Homolya. After the summer, media coverage returned to reporting merely about Tas\u00f3 giving speeches in public ceremonies and press conferences. But on the 31st of January, he eventually resigned. Soon after, he was given a new mandate as state minister responsible for the development of villages. It is yet unclear what exactly this position means.<\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Zsuzsanna Wirth tells the inside story of her reporting that infuriated state minister L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Tas\u00f3.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":2420,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[456,19],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[558],"class_list":["post-3020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2-eves-a-direkt36","category-nyomozasok-hattertortenetei","author-cap-zsuzsi"],"authors":[{"term_id":558,"user_id":0,"is_guest":1,"slug":"cap-zsuzsi","display_name":"Zsuzsi","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","description":"","first_name":"","last_name":"","user_url":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3020"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9437,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3020\/revisions\/9437"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3020"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=3020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}We keep holding the powerful accountable but we need your help. Become a supporting member now!<\/a><\/h3>\n
We keep holding the powerful accountable but we need your help. Become a supporting member now!<\/a><\/h3>\n