It was former central bank president András Simor ATV Straight talk guest of his show on Wednesday, where they talked about György Matolcsy and the MNB’s assets. At the end of the conversation, Simor told an interesting story about why he resigned from his position at Vienna’s Erste Bank in 2024.
He said that in 2020 he was elected as a member of the supervisory board of Erste Group Bank, this Viennese bank is the parent bank of all Erste subsidiaries in Central and Eastern Europe. He resigned in January 2024, six months after being elected to another three-year term, but has not yet spoken about the reason for his resignation.
According to his claim, Erste Bank Hungary’s CEO, Jelasity Radován, contacted him in December 2023 and told him that he was called to the Hungarian National Bank, also to a windowless, narrow room, so that after handing over his phone, one of the vice presidents informed him that as long as András Simor is a member of Erste Bank’s supervisory board in Vienna, the banking supervision will act “extremely strictly and very unpleasantly” with Erste Bank Hungary. This vice president was the head of monetary and banking supervision.
“I translated it into Hungarian, I call this: blackmail”
– said András Simor, then added that such abuse of office is punishable by up to three years in prison. This incident happened before Christmas, and the MNB requested “unusual data” from Erste Magyarország between Christmas and New Year as part of an investigation. When they inquired about what it was all about at this unusual time, they received the following answer from the MNB:
“your boss knows exactly what to say to my bosses to stop all this”.
Simor resigned after that, no report was filed because they could not prove the case. You can watch this part of the conversation from 11:40:
The broadcast talked about György Matolcsy’s letter, in which, according to Simor, “there are so many lies that people get pumped”. According to the former central bank governor, it is not true that Matolcsy did not have the authority to intervene in the operation of the foundations. The decisions were made by the board of trustees, but the board of trustees “did not fall there from the sky”, according to Simor, it could have been appointed by the board of the MNB under the leadership of Matolcsy. The board of trustees included a futurist, a geographer, a sustainable development expert and an extreme conspiracy theorist without any investment experience.
“Disloyal treatment, or at least negligent treatment, stops here immediately, both of which carry severe prison sentences,” said András Simor, adding that they would have had the right to revoke this appointment.
According to the 2024 balance sheet, the assets are 13 billion, “even though Matolcsy claims that the 280 billion is there. Everyone can claim something, but they can’t prove it,” he continued.
“I have bad news for György Matolcsy, the accounting rules say that if an investment is on the stock exchange, it must – not can’t, but must – be valued in the books at the stock exchange rate,” Simor referred to Matolcsy’s statement that it is not correct to judge the investment based on the stock exchange rate. “Maybe you should read the accounting rules before you make a statement,” he said.
The headquarters of the MNB was also discussed, according to Simor, when he worked there, the property served the goals listed by Matolcsy even without spending 8 million forints per square meter, a total of one hundred billion, and without “300 million forints being spent on each workplace”.
