The so-called Eclipse scandal was one of the biggest corruption cases of the last two decades in Hungary. The scandal was named after Eclipse Informatikai Zrt., a company with links to politics and the intelligence services.<\/p>\n
The firm got several high-value contracts in the mid-2000s, some of them from an agency under the Ministry of Interior. Later, the company\u2019s executives were charged in a major tax fraud case.<\/p>\n
Even though the events cast a shadow mostly over the former socialist government, some players had ties to S\u00e1ndor Pint\u00e9r, the current interior minister as well.<\/p>\n
Now, thanks to the new and old Panama Papers files, a massive cache of offshore leaks, previously unreported details emerged about the rather complex Eclipse story.<\/p>\n
According to the leaked documents, Eclipse, at the beginning of its spectacular rise, got close to an offshore company that had political links. Eclipse signed a consultancy contract with a Seychelles company called Lemmonleaf, which was owned by P\u00e9ter B\u00e9res. He was not only a member of Eclipse\u2019s supervisory board at the time but also had extensive connections to the government. He had worked in the Ministry of Interior and held positions in state-owned companies.<\/p>\n
B\u00e9res confirmed to Direkt36 that Lemmonleaf had a contract with Eclipse but he claims that in the end Lemmonleaf did not provide any services for Eclipse and did not receive payment either. He said the reason for the contract\u2019s cancellation was that he returned to the public sector and Lemmonleaf\u2019s contract posed a conflict of interest for him.<\/p>\n
Despite his long-time connections to the socialists, B\u00e9res also held positions at state-owned companies under the current government run by Viktor Orb\u00e1n. He told Direkt36 that now he\u2019s active in the area of development policies but declined to reveal where exactly he\u2019s working.<\/p>\n
The law firm that created Lemmonleaf was Mossack Fonseca, which has been at the centre of the Panama Papers controversy. In April 2016, a global investigative project led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the German newspaper S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung published hundreds of stories based on millions of internal documents that had leaked from Mossack Fonseca.<\/p>\n
As the result of a new major leak, S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung obtained another massive cache of internal Mossack Fonseca documents. The files, which are dated from early 2016 through the end of 2017, together with the previous leak, offer new insights into Mossack Fonseca\u2019s operations, including ones with connections to Hungary.<\/p>\n