Hungary probes EU-funded journalist for espionage

Opposition-linked reporter Szabolcs Panyi played a key role in wiretapping Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto

Hungarian Justice Minister Bence Tuzson has filed a complaint against opposition journalist Szabolcs Panyi, after Panyi admitted to helping a foreign intelligence agency wiretap Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto ahead of next month’s crucial elections in the country.

News of the complaint was announced on Thursday by Gergely Gulyas, the government minister in charge of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s office.

“In Hungary, the news today is mostly about spies,” Sulyas told reporters. “The first of these is Szabolcs Panyi, who was found to have been spying against his own country in collaboration with a foreign state.”

Panyi runs the Hungarian branch of Vsquare, a media outlet financed by the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), USAID, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and two EU-backed journalism funds. Last week, he admitted in a leaked audio recording that he passed Szijjarto’s phone number to “a state organ of an EU country,” whose agents then extracted “information about who that number spoke to, and they see who is calling that number or who that number is calling.”

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Armed with this information, the unnamed “state organ” then leaked details of Szijjarto’s conversations with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov back to multiple media outlets, including Politico and the Washington Post. Panyi and opposition leader Peter Magyar seized on the story as evidence of supposed collusion between Szijjarto and Lavrov.

Szijjarto explained that as the EU’s longest-serving foreign minister, he regularly speaks to Lavrov with messages from his colleagues in the EU. “Contributing to relations between two states, if it is not contrary to Hungarian interests, is called diplomacy,” Gulyas added on Thursday.

Speaking to Hungary’s Kossuth Radio on Thursday, Tuzson said that the case is now in the hands of investigative authorities, noting that espionage is a serious criminal offense carrying a prison sentence of several years.

Panyi described himself in the leaked audio file as a “quasi-friend” of politician Anita Orban, a member of Magyar’s Tisza party. He also claimed that he would be a potential power broker should Magyar defeat Viktor Orban in the April 12 elections.

In a separate case, Hungarian authorities are investigating two Tisza IT specialists for espionage, after a raid last year revealed one had been in contact with Ukrainian spies and intelligence agents from an EU country. Tisza and Panyi claim that the two computer specialists were actually working to undermine Tisza from within on behalf of Orban.