{"id":3450,"date":"2017-06-14T14:06:00","date_gmt":"2017-06-14T12:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.direkt36.hu\/?p=3450"},"modified":"2022-10-11T23:16:26","modified_gmt":"2022-10-11T21:16:26","slug":"orban-apjaval-volt-jovedelmezo-uzlete-de-olyan-vita-lett-belole-amit-kilenc-eve-keptelen-megfejteni-a-birosag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/orban-apjaval-volt-jovedelmezo-uzlete-de-olyan-vita-lett-belole-amit-kilenc-eve-keptelen-megfejteni-a-birosag\/","title":{"rendered":"He had a lucrative business with Orb\u00e1n\u2019s father but then they entered a dispute that courts have been sitting on for 9 years"},"content":{"rendered":"

The father and brothers of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n are successful businessmen. Their mine in G\u00e1nt and companies associated with it produce billions of forints (millions of euros) of annual turnover. Their performance improved after 2014, but they had also been successful before Viktor Orb\u00e1n became prime minister. Although members of the Orb\u00e1n family are experienced businessmen, in an unusually long lawsuit their lawyer argued that years ago they had been misled by a tinker.<\/p>\n

According to them, the tinker was J\u00f3zsef Kosztol\u00e1nyi, a former employee and well-paid partner of G\u00e1nt K\u0151 Ltd., one of the businesses owned by the Orb\u00e1n family. The company used Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s recipe to produce industrial glue using the dolomite mined in G\u00e1nt. The joint business was very lucrative. During several years Orb\u00e1n\u2019s family paid tens of millions of forints to Kosztol\u00e1nyi for the recipe, but most of the income from glue sales went to G\u00e1nt K\u0151 Ltd. Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s profitable business, however, unexpectedly came to an end.<\/p>\n

Kosztol\u00e1nyi thinks that G\u00e1nt K\u0151 scammed him as the company started to do business without him, but still using his recipe \u2013 so to say, the company stole his idea. The Orb\u00e1n family, on the other hand, argues that the Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s glue was not an original invention, but due to lack of expertise, the Orb\u00e1n family had not realised this for years. When they did eventually realise it, their employees developed an own recipe, and since then they sell a product that has nothing to do with the one of Kosztol\u00e1nyi.<\/p>\n

The damaged relationship led to a lawsuit, which has been going on since October 2008. During almost nine and a half years, the court was unable to decide which party is right. This is a very long trial according to the data from the National Office for the Judiciary: the court that examines Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s case has only five economic lawsuits that have been going on for over five years.<\/p>\n

We asked both the senior and junior Gy\u0151z\u0151 Orb\u00e1n about the case, but they did not react neither to our interview request nor to our questions sent by e-mail, so we only learnt their position from the court documents. D\u00e1vid Tibor, leader of Masterplast, a company selling construction materials and involved in the lawsuit as a third party, declined to comment on the issue.<\/p>\n

He had a good idea about stone powder<\/h3>\n

G\u00e1nt K\u0151 Ltd. is owned by the prime minister\u2019s parents Gy\u0151z\u0151 Orb\u00e1n and his wife, and by one of his brothers, Gy\u0151z\u0151 Orb\u00e1n junior. The latter is responsible for the day-to-day management of the company. G\u00e1nt K\u0151 has been processing and selling the dolomite mined in G\u00e1nt since 1996. The roughly ground dolomite is sold, for example, for glass production, while the residual stone powder had often gone to rubbish as the company did not know what to do with it, according to Kosztol\u00e1nyi. He started to purchase this fine dolomite powder from G\u00e1nt around 2002, in order to produce industrial glue from it.<\/p>\n

Furrier by profession, Kosztol\u00e1nyi started to develop and produce building materials in the early 2000s. His industrial glue was considered an innovation, according to Kosztol\u00e1nyi: although other producers also use fine dolomite powder for the production of industrial glue, they mix it with sand, while his glue was solely based on dolomite. First, Kosztol\u00e1nyi frequented G\u00e1nt as a buyer of dolomite powder, but after a while the Orb\u00e1n family became interested to know how he uses it. The interest turned into negotiation, then into a common business. The Orb\u00e1n family built a plant at the industrial site of the company in G\u00e1nt, and here, in 2005 they started to produce industrial glue and other building materials based on Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s recipe.<\/p>\n

Kosztol\u00e1nyi became the employee of G\u00e1nt K\u0151 and the leader of the glue plant. He also signed a contract with the company that stipulates under what conditions G\u00e1nt K\u0151 can use his recipe and his trademark Herkules. \u201cI had been pondering for months how and what to write in the contract, so that I would be protected in all possible situations,\u201d Kosztol\u00e1nyi told Direkt36.<\/p>\n

According to the contract seen by Direkt36, the company of Kosztol\u00e1nyi, Herkules 777 LP and G\u00e1nt K\u0151 agreed that the Orb\u00e1n company can use the recipe and the trademark of the materials invented by Kosztol\u00e1nyi, and in exchange Kosztol\u00e1nyi receives 5%+VAT after the net income gained on those products, and an additional 5% as a usage fee. It was also stipulated that G\u00e1nt K\u0151 has to keep the recipe secret and in case the agreement is terminated between the companies, G\u00e1nt K\u0151 cannot keep producing the products. The contract also included that without Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s permission, G\u00e1nt K\u0151 cannot produce materials based on Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s recipe but under a different name.<\/p>\n

The business kicked in, Kosztol\u00e1nyi said. According to him, G\u00e1nt K\u0151 had an annual turnover of 150-200 million forints (490000-650000 euros) from the sale of the glue, with Kosztol\u00e1nyi receiving a share of more than 10 million forints (33000 euros) besides his wage as an employee. Kosztol\u00e1nyi thinks that his extra income was the reason why a dispute emerged between him and Gy\u0151z\u0151 Orb\u00e1n senior in early 2007. Kosztol\u00e1nyi says he was self-confident during the dispute, as based on the contract he expected that if he was fired, the Orb\u00e1n family would also lose his product, and their glue plant would be left without work.<\/p>\n

To end the conflict, the company terminated Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s employment. His company, Herkules 777 LP made a new contract with G\u00e1nt K\u0151, which, in practice, became Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s manufacturer . Kosztol\u00e1nyi kept receiving orders from customers, and the Orb\u00e1n company manufactured the products for Herkules 777. The new contract only included that G\u00e1nt K\u0151 acknowledges that the recipe is owned by Herkules 777, they consider it a trade secret, and based on the recipe G\u00e1nt K\u0151 manufactures glue exclusively for Herkules.<\/p>\n

Nine years at the court<\/h3>\n

The glue manufactured in G\u00e1nt was bought and marketed, for example, by a company named Masterplast. According to Kosztol\u00e1nyi, this company was the most important buyer of the glue, accounting for 90% of all sales. A dispute between the Orb\u00e1n family and Kosztol\u00e1nyi \u2013 which later turned into lawsuit \u2013 was due to products delivered to Masterplast. In 2008, arguing that the materials were of bad quality, Masterplast did not pay some of Koszol\u00e1nyi\u2019s bills, while Kosztol\u00e1nyi did not pay some bills of G\u00e1nt K\u0151. It is unclear whether these unpaid bills are directly connected.<\/p>\n

Kosztol\u00e1ny sued Masterplast, and G\u00e1nt K\u0151 sued Kosztol\u00e1nyi due to the unpaid bills. Masterplast stated that from the autumn of 2007, many of their customers complained about the poor quality of the glue. According to the witnesses of Masterplast, Koszol\u00e1nyi was not cooperative, this is why they circumvented him and asked directly G\u00e1nt K\u0151 to produce the glue, adding more cement. According to Kosztol\u00e1nyi, this proves that G\u00e1nt K\u0151 at least once produced the glue without his permission. The Orb\u00e1n family, however, does not consider this as a breach of contract, because according to them, at that point they were not any more engaged in a contract with Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s company, and they manufactured the glue on Masterplast\u2019s explicit request.<\/p>\n

Gy\u0151z\u0151 Orb\u00e1n and the representative of Masterplast said at court that they fell out with Kosztol\u00e1nyi due to quality concerns, after which they developed a new recipe. Kosztol\u00e1nyi, however, sees this differently. \u201cIt turned out that they had tricked me, made a deal over my head, to save the money that they should have paid me,\u201d he said. Thus, he filed a counter-claim, in which he claims the money that he should have been paid, arguing that G\u00e1nt K\u0151 keeps producing glue based on his recipe.<\/p>\n

Almost four years passed until the court pronounced a first instance judgement. Based on expert evidence, it stated that the quality complaints expressed by Masterplast were unfounded, thus the unpaid bills have to be paid. At the same time, the court rejected Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s counter-claim, stating that nothing proves that G\u00e1nt K\u0151 produced glue based on Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s recipe without his permission.<\/p>\n

Kosztol\u00e1nyi appealed against the judgement. In July 2013, in a second sentence judgement the court repealed the first sentence judgement, arguing that it only took into account the statement of the Orb\u00e1n company\u2019s witness and disregarded Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s arguments. It was also unclear which evidence was taken into account for the decision. Whether the Orb\u00e1n family used Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s recipe, had to be re-examined.<\/p>\n

Four years passed since then, and there has been no judgement pronounced. Kosztol\u00e1nyi and his lawyer filed several complaints due to length of the trial, and for not having received important documents in spite of multiple requests. The court does not comment on ongoing lawsuits, thus we could not find out what the reason is for the slowness of the process. Data from the the National Office for the Judiciary show that this case is indeed among the longest lawsuits. Among similar economic lawsuits closed in the past five years, the longest one lasted for almost 5 and a half years. The court that examines Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s case currently has only five economic lawsuits that have been going on for over five years. The longest of these started in 2006.<\/p>\n

It was only in February 2016, seven years after the lawsuit began, when experts were appointed to asses which recipe and technology is used in G\u00e1nt for glue production and whether the current recipe differs from the one used by Kosztol\u00e1nyi.<\/p>\n

This was not an easy process either. First, the court asked the Budapest University of Technology to prepare the expert opinion, but they did not accept the request. After this, Kosztol\u00e1nyi noted in advance that he would not support the appointment of the state certification company named \u00c9MI, as he thinks the company has a good relationship with G\u00e1nt K\u0151. Instead of \u00c9MI, Kosztol\u00e1nyi suggested to appoint the partly privately owned T\u00dcV S\u00dcD Ltd as an expert, but this was not supported by the Orb\u00e1n family. Finally, the court chose the candidate of the Orb\u00e1n family, \u00c9MI.<\/p>\n

Familiar logo, unknown glue<\/h3>\n

The appointed experts visited the industrial site of G\u00e1nt K\u0151 in G\u00e1nt last July. \"In the yard, products were lying on pallets, ready to be delivered. As I was looking at them, a familiar logo caught my attention [...] I cut the foil open, and under it there was my sack with the Herkules trademark, with a label saying: produced by G\u00e1nt K\u0151 \u00e9s T\u0151zeg Ltd. based on the licence of Herkules 777 LP,\u201d Kosztol\u00e1nyi recalled the field visit. He said that there were several pallets with the Herkules label in the yard.<\/p>\n

He cut one sack open, but the composition of the power inside could not be determined just by looking at it. \u201cI was so nervous that although I remembered to take photos with my phone, it did not come to my mind that I should also take samples,\u201d Kosztol\u00e1nyi said, adding that the experts did not take samples from the powder either.<\/p>\n

\"helyszi\u0301ni<\/a><\/p>\n

Kosztol\u00e1nyi said that he straight away asked Gy\u0151z\u0151 Orb\u00e1n junior about the sacks, who stated that he had already paid for them when Kosztol\u00e1nyi was an employee of G\u00e1nt K\u0151. According to Kosztol\u00e1nyi, when the common glue production was launched, they ordered a huge amount of sacks as the printing house only took the job in bulk. Many of these sacks were still unused when their paths diverged. \u201cI explained to him that although he purchased these sacks in 2005, now he could not put anything in them anymore,\u201d Kosztol\u00e1nyi said.<\/p>\n

After the field visit, Kosztol\u00e1nyi went to the police station to denounce the use of his trademark. \u201cIf it was my glue in the sack, it\u2019s problematic because of that, but if it was his material sold in the sacks under my name, then it\u2019s again problematic,\u201d he said. Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s complaint was rejected due to his own fault. It turned out that the Herkules name was under trademark protection for ten years (between 2010 and 2015), but Kosztol\u00e1nyi did not pay the fee to prolong it. He only paid it shortly after the field visit, which means that at the time of the field visit the Herkules name was not under trademark protection. Kosztol\u00e1nyi was asked whether he knew about any cases when G\u00e1nt K\u0151 sold glue in sacks labelled as Herkules between 2009 and 2015, but Kosztol\u00e1nyi does not have any proof thereof.<\/p>\n

Since then, \u00c9MI prepared the expert opinion, which stated that G\u00e1nt K\u0151 does not currently produce glue based on Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s recipe, but based on its own, new recipe. \u00c9MI\u2019s conclusion, however, is only based on the description of the recipes. They did not take samples, and the experts\u2019 opinion does not include any reference to the sacks found on the yard of G\u00e1nt K\u0151. On the Orb\u00e1n family\u2019s initiative \u2013 which was, after a bit of hesitation, was also supported by Kosztol\u00e1nyi \u2013 the experts were only asked to prepare a theoretical resolution that asseses whether the recipes are the same on paper or not.<\/p>\n

What is in the sack?<\/h3>\n

The case, however, is still not over. As it is a building material, the glue produced in G\u00e1nt can only be put on the market together with a declaration of performance, which is based on the product\u2019s technical permission. This means that if one of the employees in G\u00e1nt developed a new type of glue \u2013 as G\u00e1nt K\u0151 has been stating so since the beginning of the lawsuit \u2013 the product needs to have a declaration of performance detailing its technical characteristics. During the lawsuit, Kosztol\u00e1nyi has repeatedly asked G\u00e1nt K\u0151 to present the new glue\u2019s documents, but G\u00e1nt K\u0151 has not done so, nor the court ordered them to do it. The employee who developed the glue argued that examinations have been carried out both by him in his own laboratory, and also by Masterplast. Experts, however, told Direkt36 that a new product can only be put on the market following the tests of an independent laboratory and certification company.<\/p>\n

One document, however, suggests that G\u00e1nt K\u0151 produced glue based on Kosztol\u00e1nyi\u2019s recipe even in 2011. Technical data sheets in pdf formats about Masterplast\u2019s products are available on the company\u2019s website. Last autumn, on one of the data sheets included information about the manufacturer of the glue. This information was blacked out on the document uploaded to the website, but the original text remained searchable in Google. What is more, if the document was downloaded and the blacked out line copied into a simple text editor, the name of the manufacturer became visible. It showed that the glue was manufactured by G\u00e1nt K\u0151 \u00e9s K\u0151zeg Ltd. based on the licence of Herkules 777 LP. Kosztol\u00e1nyi presented this document at court. Since then, the document was changed on the website, and it does not include references to the name of the manufacturer.<\/p>\n

Due to expert evidence, Kosztol\u00e1nyi asked for another court hearing, where they would like to ask experts and G\u00e1nt K\u0151 about the content of the sacks found on the yard. The hearing is scheduled for September.<\/p>\n

For the Hungarian company data we used the services of Opten<\/a> and C\u00e9ginfo<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an unusually long lawsuit, a former business partner of Prime Minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n's family claims that they stole his idea. The Orb\u00e1n family's company denies this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3436,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[441],"class_list":["post-3450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-az-orban-csalad-uzletei","author-vorak-anita"],"authors":[{"term_id":441,"user_id":0,"is_guest":1,"slug":"vorak-anita","display_name":"Vor\u00e1k Anita","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/dfb0c7001a49ca3732138115de52592adcf5a1dd4d892e37c6f6826a867df8e1?s=96&d=mm&r=g","description":"","first_name":"Anita","last_name":"Vor\u00e1k","user_url":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3450","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\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9222,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3450\/revisions\/9222"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3450"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=3450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}