László Tasnádi

László Tasnádi began his career in the intelligence services of the communist one-party state, then served from 2010 to 2016 as State Secretary for Law Enforcement under Interior Minister Sándor Pintér, described in reporting as the minister's confidant. According to a Direkt36 investigation, at the end of 2019 Tasnádi acquired a 33 percent stake in Communication Technologies Kft., the intermediary company that delivered NSO Group's Pegasus spyware to Hungary's security services in a roughly €6 million (HUF 2.5-3 billion) deal conducted without a public procurement process. Hungary's National Security Service voted to acquire the software in October 2017, bypassing procurement rules, and it was later deployed from 2018 onward against at least four journalists as well as businesspeople and lawyers. Tasnádi currently chairs the board of Civil Biztonsági Szolgálat Zrt., the private security company empire of his former superior, Sándor Pintér. The case is a documented example of a former Interior Ministry official personally profiting, after leaving office, from an opaque security-related deal connected to his own former ministry; the Pegasus affair has never resulted in accountability, and according to Radio Free Europe the government "essentially did not respond to the questions raised about it."