In a letter addressed to the Chair of the Parliamentary Committee on National Security, explaining why he will not accept the invitation to appear at a sitting of the committee, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that “I regard as absurd and ridiculous such political attacks and provocations, which seek to falsify the past and which ignore self-evident and documented facts.”

Socialist MP and Chair of the Parliamentary Committee Zsolt Molnár told MTI on Wednesday that the Prime Minister had informed him in writing that he will not attend the Committee’s Thursday sitting. The Prime Minister had been invited to talk about the “potential national security risks related to his person that have been discussed in the media”; this follows comments by businessman Lajos Simicska on the web portal mandiner.hu. Mr.  Simicska told the site that, during their time in compulsory military service, Mr. Orbán had been ordered to report on Mr. Simicska, but the two agreed in advance on the content of the reporting.

The Prime Minister had already given a public response to this accusation. In his letter of 24th March to the Chair of the Committee (and forwarded to MTI by Bertalan Havasi, Chief of Press at the Prime Minister’s Office), Mr. Orbán wrote that “the Hungarian public must be fully aware that we, who arrived in Hungarian politics from opposition against the communist regime, were the targets of the communist state security apparatus. We were the ones who were harassed and placed under surveillance, followed by agents and selected as targets for undercover investigation.” The Prime Minister added that “In fact we were being monitored in all areas of our lives.”

Please find the Prime Minister’s letter in the attached file.