Oligarchopedia: István Töröcskei

A quiet manager type who always comes in second. The biggest “oligarch official” who has always been working in the background and has been present at the right place where the organization needed him. At the moment he is the head of the Government Debt Management Agency Pte. Ltd. (Államadósság Kezelő Központ Zrt., ÁKK). He graduated from the Budapest University of Economic Sciences in 1973 and became an intern at the Hungarian National Bank (MNB). There he got acquainted with Imre Boros, a man who was in charge of leading the foreign exchange department of the central bank in the 1980s, who was a secretary of the then governing communist MSZMP party, and who was allegedly an officer serving in Hungary’s III/II Counterintelligence Department ‒ Mr. Boros files a lawsuit against everyone who states the latter about him in an article. Mr. Boros worked for the first Fidesz-government too.

Mr. Töröcskei spent five years at the MNB’s London branch, and under the supervision of Mr. Boros he became the deputy head of the bank’s department responsible for handling the foreign exchange transactions. In this position Mr. Töröcskei was also allegedly involved in an international currency swindle which was orchestrated by a West German foreign exchange broker. The German weekly Der Spiegel called the case the biggest financial crime since the WW2; the currency swindle created a loss of 380 million marks for the Volkswagen car maker. Eventually, the Hungarian central bank had to pay ten billion Hungarian forints in compensation. German investigators looked at Mr. Töröcskei’s role in the case but there wasn’t a person responsible for the transactions ever named on the Hungarian side.

After the central bank Mr. Töröcskei worked for Kultúrbank, and later became the president and CEO of the Hungarian Credit Bank (MHB). According to his own account, he got acquainted with Lajos Simicska during his time at MHB. During the first Orbán administration he obtained several high-profile positions at financial institutions and companies, during the times of the left-wing governments he turned out to be the main funder of right-leaning media outlets. According to atlatszo.hu’s study he is one of those officials who contributed to “capturing the Hungarian state”.

Read the original article in Hungarian here.