Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks to Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar during their meeting at the Senate Palace of the Kremlin in Moscow, Monday, Aug. 24, 2026. (Sergei Karpukhin\/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)<\/small><\/p>\n
2026-08-25T10:20:04Z<\/p>\n
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) \u2014 Hungary\u2019s foreign ministry has filed a criminal complaint with prosecutors over what it says was possible fraud related to the previous government\u2019s purchase of ventilators worth some $965 million during the COVID-19 pandemic, Foreign Minister Anita Orb\u00e1n said Tuesday. <\/p>\n
Hungary\u2019s previous government under former Prime Minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n<\/a><\/span> purchased the roughly 17,000 ventilators from China in March and April 2020, drawing criticism<\/a><\/span> at the time that it was buying far more units than could be realistically deployed and paying much more per unit than other European countries.<\/p>\n In a video posted to Facebook on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Orb\u00e1n, who is not related to the former prime minister, said the results of a ministry investigation into the purchase \u201craises suspicions of breach of fiduciary duty causing particularly substantial financial loss and other criminal offenses.\u201d<\/p>\n She didn\u2019t detail specific allegations, but noted that the investigation involved tens of thousands of documents \u2014 some of which had to be recovered using digital tools \u201cafter unsuccessful attempts to delete them\u201d \u2014 and raised further questions \u201cabout the responsibility of the ministry\u2019s former senior leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n A statement released on the Hungarian government\u2019s website on Tuesday pointed to other suspected irregularities related to the ventilator procurement, including that most of the units were purchased through intermediary companies that saw their revenues rise exponentially due to the transaction.<\/p>\n Some of the ventilators were defective, and a significant proportion of them was never deployed, the statement reads, adding that storage costs for the unused devices ran into the millions of dollars.<\/p>\n