Prosecutor’s office

After two months, there was government information again on Thursday, where the Völner-Schadl case was also discussed. In response to this, Gergely Gulyás, the minister in charge of the Prime Minister’s Office, said that, in his opinion, it was a bad practice on the part of the prosecutor’s office to include in the investigative material the telephone conversation between the president of the OBH and György Schadl, which was made public by Telex. According to him, only things that support the accusation should be included in the investigation material. According to him, the prosecutors made serious mistakes in the Schadl-Völner case.

The Central Investigative Prosecutor General’s Office responded to this in a statement, in which they wrote that “yesterday, the Minister of Government Information, Gergely Gulyás Gulyás, stated – professionally correctly – that if wiretapping takes place in a criminal case, only wiretapping material that supports the charge”. Gulyás called it a violation of personal rights that, although the conversation between György Senyei and György Schadl was not the subject of the accusation, its content nevertheless became widely known.

According to the prosecutor’s office, the case mentioned on government information is suitable for demonstrating how data is handled legally, when and how data can be deleted, in accordance with the interests of the investigation and respecting the rights of the individual.

“During the proposed arrest in the case, the investigative documents including the mentioned conversation were presented to the investigating judge, with the aim of being able to decide on the existence of well-founded suspicion and the conditions for the arrest. Copies of these documents were made available to both the suspect and the defense counsel in accordance with the law, in addition to the court. The person who disclosed the data thus obtained to the public committed a privacy violation,” they wrote.

During the investigation, it was revealed that the wiretapping materials obtained – including the specific conversation between Senyei and Schadl or György Schadl’s intervention in the case of an exam, possibly the mention of Tóni, Barbara and Ádám – do not provide a basis for a crime, do not constitute evidence, and therefore are not included in the indictment in the handed over investigation materials – they write.

“The prosecutor’s office acted legally – in compliance with the rules of criminal procedure and data protection – when handling the wiretapping materials,” concludes the Central Investigative Prosecutor General’s Office.

The later version of his investigative material compiled for the Völner-Schadl case was sent to several editorial offices, including Telex. The 11,000-page document was dated September 9, 2022, i.e. it presents a much later state of the investigation in detail. However, many of the details found in it were ultimately not included in the investigative material sent at the indictment, as they did not provide a basis for a crime, following the above justification. At the same time, Pál Völner’s defender referred to just such a detail reported by Telex the other day he asked the court to attach all conversations to the evidence, because among them there may be some that are indeed relevant from the point of view of the outcome of the case. According to him, this is also the case with Lupkovics: based on the transcript, György Schadl interceded or tried to intercede so that his dear friend, Beáta Lupkovics, who was still working as a county clerk at the time, would do well in her exam, which she was very afraid of.