BUDAPEST: A Hungarian daily on Thursday warned of a ‘precedent-setting’ attack on press freedom after police opened a criminal probe into an article on a controversial state-purchase of a loss-making bank.
According to business weekly Figyelo, its reporter Gergely Bruckner was asked by police on October 18 to reveal his sources for an article he wrote on Hungary’s nationalisation of a German-owned bank in 2014.
“We consider the case as precedent-setting in the intimidation of the press, the latest attack on independent journalism and press freedom,” Figyelo’s statement – published on its website – said.
The paper said that the probe followed a criminal complaint ‘against an unknown person for the violation of trade secrets’ made by the Hungarian central bank (MNB) – whose Governor Gyorgy Matolcsy is a close ally of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Bruckner – who has written a series of articles about the MNB’s activities since Matolcsy was appointed as its head by Orban in 2013 – was questioned as a witness, Figyelo said.
MKB was bought by the government as part of Orban’s drive to increase domestic ownership of the sector on which Bruckner’s article said that the state paid ‘too much for the struggling bank’ – which was published in 2015 shortly after MKB’s purchase from its German owner Bayerische Landesbank.
The article also referred to a letter sent by Matolcsy to Orban’s Staff Chief Janos Lazar that stated that the bank’s finances were in bad condition and probably required a capital injection.
“Figyelo wrote the truth about the purchase of MKB,” the newspaper wrote, “And not a single request for a correction has ever arrived in connection with the article.”