Government: Former head of Quaestor brokerage ‘common criminal’

Budapest, November 24 (MTI) – Csaba Tarsoly, the former head of the scandal-mired brokerage Quaestor in preliminary detention awaiting trial “is nothing other than a common criminal”, János Lázár, the government office chief said in reply to a question at a weekly news briefing on Thursday.

Commenting on an interview to the weekly Magyar Narancs in which Tarsoly criticised the central bank and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for their alleged role in Quaestor’s demise — which left its clients short of money invested with the brokerage — Lázár said his impression left from reading the interview was that Tarsoly blamed everyone for the brokerage’s bankruptcy but himself.

“He would rather blame Jesus Christ for Quaestor’s bankruptcy instead of admitting to how many tens of billions of forints he stole,” Lázár said, adding that the accusations of a man who has been in jail for a long time were “empty”.

The National Bank of Hungary (NBH) on Thursday said it was filing a complaint to police against Tarsoly for libel and slander against the bank and its officials.

In a statement, the NBH rejected “false statements” it said Tarsoly had made in the Magyar Narancs interview. Tarsoly, who is currently in preliminary detention on charges of fraud and embezzlement in connection with Quaestor’s bankruptcy, maintained his innocence in the interview.

Tarsoly insisted comments made by the prime minister in one of his regular Friday morning radio interviews had triggered a run on the brokerage.

The central bank (NBH) said Tarsoly’s insistence that its investigation on March 9 last year had found no shortfall of clients’ assets was incorrect and the raid had revealed a shortfall of 150 billion forints of clients’ assets.

Tarsoly had claimed the decision to record minutes of a meeting last March with the central bank’s deputy governor, László Windisch, had been his own. The bank countered that it was Windisch who insisted on recording the meeting, which he handed to police investigators along with the findings of an on-spot raid of Questor’s headquarters which the NBH had carried out in its capacity as financial regulator.