Thread by @marguerite_jay

This is a story about
a name (Viktor Urban),
a place (Switzerland/Hungary)
a mysterious document (a work registration).

It’s a tale about many things that didn’t add up – that left my amazing colleague @kelleralant & me in despair the more we went down the rabbit hole.

In the end, all we had in our hands was just a very odd backstory.



Ready for the ride?

Last year, we received a document for short-term employment in Switzerland. Seasonal workers from Eastern Europe use it. They come,work for < 3 months,then leave again. So our document looked very normal. But something caught our eye:

Name and birthdate?

Viktor Orbán.

The employer was a company registered in Switzerland, owned by a Hungarian citizen. According to the document, Orbán worked as a plasterer in Switzerland for one month in January 2014. The company was established in 2012 and liquidated shortly after the supposed employment.

We wondered: Was it possible that the Hungarian Prime Minister was really registered as a Swiss employee? But why would Viktor Orbán need such a paper? There have been rumours about a Swiss bank account for years.

Additionally, several strange travels by train from Budapest to Zurich have been recorded - just after this document had been issued. These trips had never been declared properly by the Hungarian government.

@kelleralant and I could not let this go.

So first we made sure the document was not forged. We talked to labour lawyers and the Zurich labour authority. The document was real. And middlemen for Hungarian workers and Swiss companies told us: such a paper might be useful.

Anyone can open a bank account in Switzerland, but foreigners who have neither a job nor a residence in Switzerland face several restrictions.



Hmm.

So we continued our poking.

What followed was a hunt to the outskirts of Budapest and the snowy Swiss countryside, where a neighbour told us:

"I remember a few years ago the house was rented out to some Hungarians. (...). They didn't speak a word of German. (...) Once a week a guy drove there in a big Mercedes. Then I could hear them arguing loudly, but I didn't understand what they were talking about."

We came across another document, from 2020: the decision of the Zurich prosecutor’s office to not investigate for money laundering - despite stating that "the circumstances presented in the complaint are really strange, if not suspicious.“

@kelleralant and I were getting more and more frustrated. We had all these open ends and no real thread. We were building hypotheses and scrapping them - over and over again. And after many long days and nights we realised: there’s nothing.

Or there is something: a loophole in the Swiss work registration system.



The document was real. And not real at the same time.

Responsible for our investigation had been a document issued by Felix - a former Swiss labour union guy with a heart for Hungarians...

It turned out to be… somewhat of a joke.



This is a story of an investigation that falls flat - and why we still decided to write about it.

Here it is, in Hungarian for @RFERL:

szabadeuropa.hu/a/orban-svjac-…