Reporters of the telex.hu website caught the serving foreign minister during his regular jogging. Szijjártó accepted the request for an interview, saying that he would at least show people that he had not fled the country. He rejected the information that his ministry is shredding documents.
At Monday’s international press conference, Magyar said that he had just received information about the shredding of sanctions documents at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “It’s a huge piece of crap,” Szijjártó responded. The head of Hungarian diplomacy stated that all documents are also available in electronic form.
“They can go through documents from the last twelve years. My conscience is clear,” said Szijjártó, adding that he certainly did not provide them to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Szijjártó also claims that it is not true that he was too close to Russia and to Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov. “We have closer cooperation with a number of other states,” he said. “Russia is possible in the top ten,” he added.
Unknown Russian
According to the Ukrainian server Jevropejska pravda, an unknown citizen of the Russian Federation was supposed to accompany Szijjártó to the ministry building on Monday. A Ukrainian source claims that the purpose of his presence was supposed to be a “purge” at the ministry and also the shredding of sensitive documents. However, this information cannot be directly independently verified.
The future foreign minister, Anita Orbán (a mere coincidence of names with former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán – editor’s note) stated that the shredding should have continued on Tuesday.
“This is unacceptable. We strongly urge Minister Péter Szijjártó and his colleagues to immediately stop any destruction of documents. In addition, he must not delete any data or documents from any electronic record system,” Orbán wrote in a post on Facebook.
Just before the elections, it became clear that Szijjártó offered his Russian counterpart Lavrov in a phone call to send him an EU document that contained a negotiating framework for starting accession talks with Ukraine. In another published wiretapping, Szijjártó pledged to try to remove the sister of Russian oligarch Ališer Usmanov from the EU sanctions list. He succeeded.
