BUDAPEST, Hungary — In a major development that reignites scrutiny of pandemic-era public procurement decisions, Hungary’s current foreign ministry has launched a criminal complaint over allegations of potential fraud connected to a 2020 $965 million ventilator purchase orchestrated by the country’s former administration, Foreign Minister Anita Orbán confirmed Tuesday.
The controversial procurement saw the government of former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán buy roughly 17,000 ventilators from Chinese suppliers in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, between March and April 2020. Even at the time of the purchase, the deal drew sharp public criticism: observers argued the country had acquired far more units than it could ever reasonably put into clinical use, and that the per-unit price Hungary paid far outpaced what other European nations paid for identical equipment.
In a public video posted to her official Facebook page this week, Foreign Minister Anita Orbán — who has no family relation to former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — outlined findings from the foreign ministry’s internal probe into the procurement. The investigation, she explained, has uncovered reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, including breach of fiduciary duty that caused exceptionally large financial harm to Hungarian public funds, alongside other potential criminal offenses.
While the foreign minister did not share specific, granular details of individual allegations, she noted that investigators reviewed tens of thousands of documents related to the deal. Critically, a portion of those records had to be recovered using specialized digital forensic tools after attempts to permanently delete them were made, she added. The findings have also opened new lines of inquiry into potential accountability for the foreign ministry’s former senior leadership, she said.
A public statement published on the Hungarian government’s official website expanded on the suspected irregularities uncovered by the probe. The majority of the ventilators were acquired through intermediary third-party companies, the statement confirmed, and the single transaction pushed these firms’ revenues to extraordinary, exponential levels that would not have been possible otherwise.
Beyond the suspicious procurement structure, the statement added that many of the delivered ventilators were found to be defective upon arrival. A large share of the total order was never deployed for patient care at all, and ongoing storage costs for these unused medical devices have already amounted to millions of dollars in additional public spending.
The 2020 ventilator purchase was overseen by Péter Szijjártó, who served as Hungary’s foreign minister for nearly 12 years under the previous administration and built close diplomatic and economic ties with China during his tenure. Szijjártó also oversaw a separate pandemic-era procurement of 5 million doses of China’s Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine, alongside advancing major Chinese investments in Hungary.
Just last month, Szijjártó resigned his elected seat in the Hungarian Parliament to accept a senior executive role at Chinese automotive giant BYD, a move that sparked widespread backlash over allegations of conflict of interest. While in office, Szijjártó facilitated hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies for BYD’s major manufacturing investment in Hungary. In the wake of his move to the company, the current Hungarian government has already launched a separate probe into BYD’s investments in the country that were secured during Szijjártó’s time in office.