Several old confidants of the mayor, such as Csaba Tordai, the current chief legal advisor of the City Hall, and Gábor Perjés, a politician from Párbeszéd, were also involved in the financial machination.
The considerable amount that was used to finance Gergely Karácsony's mayoral campaign in 2019 came through a car rental company, namely from abroad, it was revealed to the Magyar Nemzet on Monday, from the processed part of the package of documents leaked to the Magyar Nemzet on Monday, presumably from the mayor's immediate circle of trust.
The information provided to Mediaworks reveals who the key players are and how they tried to document the campaign funding coming from abroad. The name of Csaba Tordai appears in the documents, for example, who is the mayor's chief legal advisor and is closely connected to the left, as he was the state secretary of the Prime Minister's Office during the administrations of Ferenc Gyurcsány and Gordon Bajnai. The following can be outlined from the latest information:
A significant part of the HUF 112 million received from abroad through the company of his partner Csaba Tordai was delivered to Gábor Perjés using a method eerily similar to the "donation collection" technique of the 99 Movement, and then he paid it several times in cash to the bank account of the association supporting Gergely Karácsony's mayoral campaign. The papering of the money was carried out in the also known way, with the help of Csaba Tordai, with the records issued from the donation collection boxes.
Tordai again
According to the documents reviewed by Magyar Nemzet, Csaba Tordai was also the key figure in the story that has just been discovered.
The managing owner of the already mentioned car rental company, named Bakony Rental Kft., is none other than Tordai's life partner, Zsolt Mravik, who has also appeared in Gergely Karácsony's environment in recent years.
Since 2014, Mravik has held leadership positions almost continuously alongside Karácsony, most recently in the capital, and before that, when Karácsony was the mayor of Zugló, then in that district. To this day, the sole owner and managing director of the mentioned company is Zsolt Mravik, its legal representative is Csaba Tordai, and its registered office is registered at the joint address of the two.
Suspicious outlier sales just in the year of the elections
The company database reveals that
in the year of the last municipal election, Mravik's business produced a brutal, 238-fold increase in sales revenue: the amount increased from HUF 500,000 to HUF 119.2 million. It is also interesting that in the following years its net sales revenue never rose above HUF 20 million, i.e. the 2019 campaign year is the only outstanding result. It can be seen from the data that Bakony Rental Kft. obtained this unusual sales revenue from a single, 112.5 million forints worth of consulting service abroad.
Of the 112 million forints from Bakony Rental Kft.'s foreign consultancy assignment, Zsolt Mravik withdrew 84 million forints as a dividend advance even before the local elections in October, of which, according to information from Magyar Nemzet, 75 million forints went to Gábor Perjés in cash with the help of a colleague who is currently working as a consultant at City Hall. on September 17, 2019.
Perjés then paid the cash he received from the Mraviks in several installments into the bank account of the MIBU association supporting the mayoral candidate campaign. And according to Magyar Nemzet, the dates and amounts of the bank account payments are almost the same as the minutes of the opening of the association's "donation chests" and the amounts of money "found" there.
According to the minutes obtained by Mediaworks, the alleged chests were opened by Perjés in the Párbeszéd Várfok utca office in the last weeks of the campaign, in the presence of witnesses. Minutes were made of all this based on a sample written by Csaba Tordai.
Revealing internal correspondence
Part of the information package processed by Magyar Nemzet is also the correspondence that took place in Gergely Karácsony's inner circle during the 2021 primary election campaign about the affairs of the 99 Movement. In the first email we have, dated August 26, 2021
Gábor Perjés complained that no payments had been made to the 99 Movement's bank account and the financial institution called on him to settle the debt due to the bank costs incurred in the meantime.
In the circular addressed to Karácsony and his staff, Perjés said:
When I was asked to be the honorary leader of the Ninety-Nine Association, I thought it would go as smoothly as it did in the case of MIBU."
Later, the money arrived, but the correspondence is not important for that reason, but because, according to the Hungarian Nation, it proves that the 2019 and 2021-22 campaign financing worked with the same technique.
Featured image: Balázs Hatlaczki/PS
