Hungary has failed to adopt key parts of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s anti-bribery framework, the standards-setting body said, adding it could send a high-level mission to Budapest unless its concerns are allayed soon. Separately, the European Union executive last September recommended suspending some 7.5 billion euros in funding for Hungary over its failure to curb corruption, the first such case in the 27-nation bloc under a new sanction meant to better protect the rule of law.
While Hungary has made some progress towards releasing the funds that would help its economy weather an economic downturn amid surging inflation, some milestones have yet to be reached to get the funds flowing from April at the earliest. Nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, in power since 2010, has said Hungary was no more corrupt than others in Europe, with government officials pointing to a European Parliament-Qatar corruption scandal as an example.
A government spokesman did not immediately respond to emailed questions for comment. “Hungary continues to fail to implement key aspects of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention and to enforce its foreign bribery laws,” said the working group of countries party to the OECD’s convention and tasked with monitoring adherence to it.
The working group said Hungary should report back by June that it has made ‘significant progress’ on recommendations. “The proposed high-level mission results from Hungary’s failure to make tangible progress in addressing long-standing recommendations including several that date back to its Phase 3 evaluation (March 2012),” it said.
It said the recommendations related to Hungary’s lack of understanding of foreign bribery risk exposure, absence of strategy for detecting and investigating foreign bribery cases and inadequate time to apply investigative measures to suspects in complex cases, among other concerns. The OECD statement coincided with the German anti-corruption non-profit agency, Transparency International, publishing its annual Corruption Perceptions Index, a global survey, which described Hungary as “the most corrupt member state of the European Union.”
In a statement to state news agency MTI, Orban’s government slammed Transparency International for leaving the European Parliament out of its corruption survey. In December, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters that Francesco Giorgi, one of the main suspects in the investigation along with his partner, ousted European Parliament vice-president Eva Kaili, confessed to taking bribes from Qatar to influence European Parliament decisions on Qatar.
Hungary had irregularities in nearly 4% of EU fund spending in 2015-2019, according to the bloc’s anti-fraud body OLAF, by far the worst result among the 27 EU countries.
(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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