Police processed the scene at the Sóvirág Guesthouse in Sic for three days in April 2022. The guesthouse was built by János Sallai, who has been re-elected mayor for 33 years and then expanded by his son and daughter with EU funds in the mid-2000s. Three years ago, while digging a trench at the guesthouse, a gas pipe was broken. The pipe hadn’t been recorded by the company making the natural gas connection and gas supplier. As a result, the police began investigating on suspicion of classified fuel theft and illegal gas connection. The proceedings have been going on for more than three years without any noticeable results. This year, the prosecutor’s office hasn’t even responded to our questions sent every few months.
The authorities are equally silent on the issue of developments in the village, which have been under investigation for years. We will now take a look at these developments and show how a local construction contractor and the mayor’s family are profiting from them.
We shall also reveal the violation of the law by which the mayor and his office have effectively concealed important municipal documents, even though this obfuscation is not punishable by law. Mayor János Sallai gets both political and financial benefits from this:
- voters mainly know what he tells them in person;
- his opponents have little insight into how the office operates and it is impossible to trace back even the decisions of the local council for years;
- locally, people do not know how much agricultural subsidies the mayor and his family members receive in addition to their salaries and businesses although they hardly farm at all.
The pride of Transylvanian identity
Szék / Sic is one of the most famous rural settlements of the Hungarian community in Romania, located about 30 km east of Cluj-Napoca. The people of Sic are rightly proud of their village’s past and its famous and rich folklore. Both of these features make it stand out among the villages of Transylvania, as do its tourist potential and the visible prosperity of its inhabitants.
The inhabitants of Sic supplemented their farming income with seasonal work in Cluj and Budapest as early as the middle of the 20th century. Since then, many have remained in the cities or abroad, so despite relative prosperity and newcomers, the population of Sic has been declining by 10% every decade. According to the latest census data, more than 90% of its 2,234 inhabitants are Hungarian. János Sallai has been elected and re-elected mayor since 1992: before the informant scandal, he represented the Hungarian political party in Romania, the DAHR [Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania] and later ran as an independent, but with the tacit support of the DAHR.
Decades ago, Sallai already saw potential in rural tourism, according to the press of the time. He introduced piped drinking water and natural gas to Sic earlier than most villages in Transylvania, although sometimes such public utility projects took up to ten years to be completed. He had even the village’s smallest streets paved more than ten years ago, but residents are able to connect to the sewage system this year. He established a country house and a tourist information centre with government support.
Several guesthouses are trying to make a living in the village. Two private initiatives are working to preserve folk culture: the dance house museum of Michel Van Langeveld, who has passed away this year, and the Blue House, which was purchased by the Sic Civil Circle Association to serve as a community centre and later as a village museum in the renovated farmhouse.
We wrote more about Sic and the mayor last fall, when we detailed the developments for which the mayor did not seek permission from the authorities and controversially initiated or terminated them. These include the establishment of the salty bath spa in Sic that dries and pollutes the reed by the village, the paving and covering of the brook bed running through the village and the paving conducted after the sewerage works.
At that point, we were forced to point out Mayor János Sallai’s strange relationship with the facts and his own past. He even went to the Constitutional Court to have the information proven by documents and made public since 2008 deleted, namely that he had been an informant for the Securitate before 1990. Then, in an interview with us, he denied not only that he had reported to the Securitate, but also that he had appealed for years to have his past as an informant erased. But in vain.
However, by doing so, he calls into question the credibility of all the information that he himself is the source of.
The scandal didn’t crush the mayor
During our interview conducted with him, he repeatedly stated that he believed his local rivals were inciting people against him and that he had been expecting us to show up even before last year’s municipal elections. Sallai has been claiming since 2007 that he has been the victim of political smear campaigns. He explained this by saying that the police had launched an investigation against him for the unlawful payment of social benefits and for informally carrying out road repairs and procurements, such as supplying stone for certain road repairs through his son’s company. To our knowledge, nothing came happened with the case, but it was at this point that Sallai gained more serious local rivals.
Although Béla Markó,then the president of DAHR, campaigned in Sic in person during Romania’s first EP elections, in November 2007 more people in the village voted for the rival László Tőkés, who was running as an independent, than for the DAHR’s European Parliament candidates. In the spring of 2008, the local branch of the Hungarian Civic Party was formed, which supported Márton Csorba, the deputy mayor at the time, in the summer municipal elections.
In this election, Sallai was put under the most pressure, as his past as an informer was revealed. The DAHR distanced itself from him and appointed a rival candidate, but Sallai and Csorba, both running as independent, made it to the second round. Sallai won this round with 57% of the vote. Since then, he has been winning with an increasingly high percentage of the vote, with no opposition from the DAHR, only tacit support.
Márton Csorba ran for mayor once more in 2016, unsuccessfully. In 2024, his son, Szilárd Csorba, youth vice president of the Alliance of Hungarians in Transylvania, ran against Sallai, admitting that he did so to prevent personal conflicts and passions from dominating the local campaign, and won 30% of the vote.
Not a grain of sand was seen in the ditch
Personal conflicts arose between Csorba sr. and Sallai between 2004 and 2008, when they jointly managed the village. Márton Csorba told us that they stirred things up when, as deputy mayor, he refused to sign off on the contractor’s claim that they had laid the required amount of sand under the gas pipes that were being laid at the time, when he could not see a single grain of sand in the trenches. However, he did see the scandalous investment in the never-used retirement home, which also fell through and the mayor’s son is now profiting from the building.
Over the past ten years, matters concerning Sic have disappeared from the daily press. There are no regular reports on the once popular dance camps, Sic Days, village development and even the annual Bartholomew’ Day celebrations are rarely mentioned. The image of the former model Hungarian village has faded.
Sallai himself does not consider it his duty to disclose every detail of the matters we asked him about. ‘I’m not bound to reveal everything, am I?’ he cut in when we tried to clarify how long he had owned the company that operates the Sóvirág Guesthouse.
Three years ago, an excavator broke through the presumably illegal gas connection at this guesthouse while digging a trench for the next phase of public utility works. Márton Csorba, who runs a sawmill nearby, learned about the investigation that was launched at the time. He often visited the site during the three-day investigation, was stopped by the police and after learning from them what had happened, he notified the local press.
Only GherlaInfo in Gherla reported that the police, together with employees of the gas company, had identified an illegally connected, approximately 75 m long gas pipeline. The Hungarian press in Cluj County has been silent. The prosecutor’s office in Gherla, leading the investigation, has not provided any substantive information for three years and does not appear to be working on the case. Yet the family and background interests surrounding the guesthouse are not that complicated.
Gas at the mayor’s guesthouse
During the period when natural gas was introduced, the Sóvirág Guesthouse and the adjacent wedding hall were operated by two separate companies. One of them was founded in 2005 by the mayor’s daughter, Zsuzsi Pap (Sallai) and less than ten years later it merged into the family business, Tipca. Tipca Import Export Ltd. was founded by János Sallai in 1993, just under a year after he was elected mayor.
Sallai couldn’t remember exactly when he opened the guesthouse, but according to a description on an accommodation booking website, it all started in 2000. Tipca Import Export, which operates the guesthouse, switched to hospitality in 2007, but animal breeding, carpentry and joinery, electrical installation and painting and decorating also appear in the company’s business profile at the time.
2007, the year we joined the EU, brought about another important change to the company: the mayor had to leave the business. His wife, who had been Tipca’s company director, also left. The company was taken over by the mayor’s son, János Sallai, who has the same name. His sister, Zsuzsi, received a 30% share in the company in 2014 when her company merged with Tipca, according to the company database.
The benefit of having two companies behind the two units of the guesthouse was that both could apply for EU funding. Both were built with pre-accession funds: one under the Phare program and the other under the SAPARD program, according to the mayor’s first 2008 asset declaration, which we downloaded from the databases of the Integrity Agency (ANI). The mayor confirmed during the interview that the two units were built with Phare and SAPARD funds.
When, well over three years ago, they found the gas pipe that shouldn’t have been there, even though his son had owned the guesthouse for 14 years, the mayor referred to it as my guesthouse at that heated council meeting, where the local opposition, the then councillors of the MPP [Hungarian People’s Party], called for his resignation. They objected that the gas theft case was cast over the entire village.
“Sometimes I say ‘my guesthouse’. It doesn’t mean anything. So they [his children – ed.] run it, it’s all theirs,” was one of the mayor’s responses when we asked him about his choice of words. His other response was that he also refers to it as our guesthouse and that he and his wife also go to help out at the guesthouse when the children ask them to.
The pipe and the gas
We spoke with János Sallai and his son about the gas issue a few weeks apart. The only thing they agreed on was that the guesthouse definitely did not steal gas as it was supplied via a legally installed pipe.
The mayor said that the gas pipe found three years ago does lead to the guesthouse, but he assumes that the company that built the gas network left something unfinished there. According to him, the contractor wanted to connect the gas when the Sóvirág buildings did not yet exist. This contradicts the mayor’s 2008 declaration of assets, according to which the later-built unit of the guesthouse had already completed in 2006. The gas connection works began around that time, and according to several sources, the actual gas supply only started years later.
János Sallai Jr. said that the gas pipe, subject to investigation, is not even connected to the later-built unit of the guesthouse. Since that building was also built with grant money, Sallai Jr. said it is possible that a separate gas connection was part of the project, but in the end, they did not connect a separate gas pipe to that building, but instead connected it to the first one.
Even the name of the suspected crimes contradicts their explanation:
illegal gas connection and classified fuel theft. In response to our question, the prosecutor’s office pointed out these two suspicions a few weeks after the investigation began. The suspicion of fuel theft would not have arisen if the pipe had not been connected to the guesthouse and the gas supplier had not suffered any losses. The first article reporting on the investigation concludes by saying that the damage will be assessed, but for years we have been asking the prosecutor’s office in vain whether the damage has been assessed and how much it is estimated to be.
In the meantime, however, we learned that Sallai Jr. had paid the damages to the gas supplier, CPL Concordia. We received some very interesting answers when we asked about this. The mayor declared he didn’t mediate between his son and the gas supplier.
“I have nothing to declare on the matter. No… Let’s not get into it; they didn’t conduct any investigation whatsoever, nothing” ‒ replied Sallai Jr. when asked whether he or Tipca had paid the damages to the gas supplier CPL Concordia. He then repeated that he did not wish to comment on the matter.
The manager of CPL Concordia stayed silent. First, I visited the company’s headquarters in Cluj-Napoca, where the Italian director, Andrea Gualdi, sent word through his secretary that he did not wish to discuss the matter. An hour later, I sent my questions by email, in case he changed his mind. In addition to the damage and possible compensation, I was also interested in whether someone could join their network without the network builder knowing or Concordia noticing the gas loss.
The director opened the email containing nine questions within a minute. Then twenty more times in the next hour. At least, that’s what the email tracker program I use showed.
Why has the investigation been dragging along for over three years?
Last autumn, both János Sallai Sr. and János Sallai Jr. said that they had not yet been called in to testify in the case. In other words, in the two and a half years since the investigation started, the prosecutor’s office has not questioned János Sallai Jr., who runs the guesthouse, either as a witness or as a suspect.
Over the past year, I have regularly asked the prosecutor’s office in Gherla why this case is so complicated that they are not making any progress: they are not pressing charges, but they are not closing the case either. The prosecutor’s office did not respond. I argued in vain that the case was of public interest due to the involvement of the mayor and his family, the prosecutor’s office repeated that it could only provide information about the investigation to those who had some kind of criminal status in the case.
Citing the same reason, the prosecutor’s office in Gherla is also keeping quiet about two other cases, which are entirely public matters. It has not even disclosed whether the investigation is still ongoing and, if so, what crimes are suspected. We know from the DNA [National Anticorruption Directorate] and private individuals that they investigated two otherwise justified public investments, but there is no official information about the closure of the proceedings.
No one ages in Sic anymore
More than ten years after the retirement home was ready, the DNA was still investigating, confirmed Márton Sallai, pastor of the Reformed Church congregation in Sic. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office questioned him as a witness around 2016 because the building in which the local authorities in Sic established a retirement home with government aid is owned by the Reformed Church. However, the retirement home never operated.
The church-owned building in the centre of the village used to be a denominational school before nationalisation, then a cultural centre during the communist regime, and later a warehouse. In the years following the change of regime, it fell into complete disrepair. Since the building was listed in the municipality’s inventory, the mayor said, Sallai spent years looking for ways to have it rehabilitated. When the National Investment Company (CNI) announced government subsidies for retirement homes, the mayor seized the opportunity and applied for financing.
The building was renovated and furnished in 2004 with 300,000 lei received from the CNI, according to the mayor’s recollections. Some beds were even donated, confirmed the mayor and Márton Csorba, who became deputy mayor in 2004. However, the retirement home never opened because the municipality did not have the money to pay for cooks and caregivers, explained János Sallai.
Although the call for tenders stated that additional funds would need to be raised to operate the retirement home, the tender itself did not cover this, nor did it stipulate any obligation to operate the facility, said Sallai.
Márton Csorba and the minister remember it otherwise.
According to Csorba, the rehabilitation tender did indeed stipulate that the building renovated for this purpose should then operate as a retirement home. He said that inspectors even visited the site when he was deputy mayor. He specifically remembers the mayor sending the office caretaker to the basement to fetch the sign that had to be hung on the retirement home before the inspectors arrived.
The inspectors did not speak to him, he was not in office at the time and he does not know how the mayor handled the situation. He also does not understand how the office could have received government funds and a permit for the rehabilitation works when the building was not owned by the local authority. The mayor rejected his assumption that the application had included the cadastral number of another building, one that was actually owned by the town hall.
According to him, only the renovation financed by the grant was inspected, and everything was found to be in order, as was the case ten years later during the police investigation. However, the latter investigation also covered the ownership of the building, but it is not known whether it was closed due to the absence of a criminal offense or possibly due to the statute of limitations. In any case, the prosecutor’s office did not press charges, said the mayor.
If its function is social, it cannot be maintained
Minister Márton Sallai recalls that when he arrived in Sic in 2008, the presbyters at the time told him that the building belonged to the parish and that, if they wanted, the local council would return it to the church’s management.
‘I said at that time that we didn’t want it since the retirement home was not operating (nevetherless it was fully furnished: there were beds, nightstands, there was a kitchen as well as central heating) and I didn’t want the state to hold us accountable for not having started the retirement home five years earlier, as it was the purpose for which it had been rehabilitated,’ said the minister. And the parish did not have the means to care for the elderly and pay for healthcare staff.
Márton Sallai understands that the earlier nationalisation of the building was never entered into the land registry, so the building legally remained in parish ownership. During an investigation in the mid-2010s, the police asked him to find the parish’s decision that transferred the building to the local council for renovation. However, he could not find such a document.
Meanwhile, the parish won more than two million euros for the renovation of the church. The works were carried out between 2013 and 2015, with the parish providing accommodation for the workers at the contractor’s request. This is why they asked for and eventually got back the building of the nonexistent retirement home, which had previously been vacated by the town hall.
A retirement home turned into a family business
The building was already structurally unstable at that time, explained the minister. According to the mayor, it is structurally sound, but because it was not in use, rain leaked in, causing the walls to crack. During the renovation of the church, the minister sought the opinion of a structural engineer, who advised that it would be best to have the building demolished.
The building, which was constantly decaying, was not demolished even after it was no longer needed as a workers’ hostel. The parish was unable to make use of it, explained the minister, and no entrepreneur in Sic was interested in it. So when the mayor’s son applied to rent it in 2022, they gave it to him. More precisely, the mayor’s new family company moved into it to start a new business with more public funds.
In 2020, János Sallai Jr. took over Chicibalazs Const Ltd., which had been involved in construction until then. In 2021, he handed it over to his mother, the wife of Mayor Sallai. According to the company’s new profile, it will manufacture household products from paper and cardboard. To start production, the company received €160,000 from the AFIR rural development fund. It only had to contribute 10% of its own funds.
According to the tender panel, production should have started by 2024 at the latest. When we visited it in the spring of 2023, the building was still in ruins, but by the summer of 2024, the central part had been repaired and a huge roll of paper was put behind its glass door. They will manufacture lightweight paper products, which the building can handle, replied János Sallai Jr., who said that it was not a problem that the building could be accessed only by a pedestrian walkway. Trucks cannot drive up, but smaller cars can.
According to Márton Csorba, production has not yet started this year, but the site has been closed off. For decades, residents of the upper part of Csipkeszeg street have been using the path next to the building to reach the village centre. This year, however, the grassy courtyard of the building was fenced off along with the path, eliminating this well-trodden shortcut.
Csorba was bothered by the fact that the parish did not call for tenders in the case of the building, but instead allowed the mayor’s family to rent it immediately. According to the minister, they were constantly looking for tenants, but János Sallai Jr. replied that the building had not been advertised. He negotiated with the Cluj church district because they wanted to rent it for a longer period of time in exchange for having it renovated against a very low rent. We finally learned from the minister that the church had rented the building for 11 years for fifty euros a month.
After publishing the Hungarian version of this article, we received the lease agreement itself from János Sallai Jr. This shows that Chicibalazs Const Ltd. pays fifty euros of the monthly rent of € 200 to the parish, and undertakes to maintain the building for eleven years from the remaining € 20,500.
Farming money not the land
Over the past three years, other companies owned by members of the mayor’s family have also received rural development subsidies. According to the public database where data are available on the platform only for two years, the mayor’s daughter’s beauty parlour received €14,000 in 2022 because it operated in a rural area while the overall yearly turnover of the company hardly exceeded €5,000 that year.
Tipca Import Export Ltd., which is now owned by the mayor’s son, received €26,000 in public funds in 2023, with a turnover of €110,000. These amounts are not out of line with the rural development subsidies received by other limited liability companies in the region, most of which receive between €14,000 and €26,000. After publishing the Hungarian version of this article, the rural development agency revealed that it payed €118,680 to Tipca out of a total €220,000 payed in the village in 2023.
In addition to these grants, the mayor and his family also get significant income from agricultural subsidies on an individual basis. Much more than the mayor has ever admitted. For much more than they have declared to farm.
Mayor János Sallai has a duty, as part of his position, to declare and publish his own assets and those of his family members living in the same household. He did not bother with the publication: neither his nor the local councillors’ asset declarations can be found on the local website. We downloaded them from the ANI databases, as it is unrealistic to expect voters to know where to find these documents.
In his asset declaration, the mayor listed his children’s income and real estate until 2013, presumably because they lived together until then. After that, he only listed his own and his wife’s salaries as income. He only listed agricultural subsidies from 2019 onwards, and even then, he listed much less than the actual amount: RON 10,000 per year, rising to RON 16,000 lei in 2023.
Therefore, we requested the APIA payment agency to provide information on the annual agricultural subsidies received by János Sallai since 2007 and the subsidies received by his family members since 2015. Between 2007 and 2023, the mayor declared a total of RON 553,000 as salary and RON 46,000 in agricultural subsidies. In reality, however, he received RON 170,000 from APIA during this period, nearly four times the amount he declared. In 2013-14, for example, he received almost as much as his annual salary at the time. Meanwhile, he listed 14 hectares of land as his own.
Together with his close family, he has received a total of RON 700,000 in agricultural subsidies since 2015. His family members have also earned well from “farming”: his wife received RON 122,000, his daughter RON 175,000 and his son RON 224,000 in agricultural subsidies between 2015 and 2023. It is also worth marrying into the Sallai family: the mayor’s son-in-law, Zsolt Pap, has been the deputy mayor’s advisor for years. And, of course, he too has been receiving RON 30,000 in agricultural subsidies annually since at least 2022.
The mayor’s office keeps track of how much land each farmer cultivates (whether on their own or leased land). The mayor’s office issues certificates to farmers stating how much land they farm, i.e., how much land they can claim agricultural subsidies for from APIA.
Not a hobby sum for hobby farmers
We compared the average per capita subsidies received by the immediate family in 2022-23 with the average amount received by private individuals in the village during the same period. The average agricultural subsidy for family members was RON 53,000, while for village residents it was RON 37,000 for two years. (We did not include subsidies received by companies in this calculation.)
An even bigger problem is that the state generously supports the welfare of people who demonstrably do not make a living from farming. Sallai himself has been mayor for 33 years, his children run businesses in other fields and his wife will manufacture household paper products even though she is on disability pension, according to her husband’s latest asset declaration.
János Sallai Jr. answered with a clear ‘no’ when asked if any of them were farmers by trade. He said that the family members only had a few hectares and a small farm and none of them were involved in large-scale production or animal husbandry.
During the interview, Mayor Sallai tried to give the impression that he and his wife were some kind of hobby farmers who spent a few hours each afternoon working on their land. But he also said that “we don’t really produce much.” He ultimately justified the large sums we confronted him with by saying that most of them were the so-called butterfly subsidies.
Soaring amounts
Although butterfly subsidies seems like a fairy tale phrase, they are very real and substantial support. As it turns out, part of the Sic area also falls within the protected area of the large blue butterfly (Maculinea). This rare butterfly species only lives in chemical-free meadows and pastures as untouched as possible. To minimize disturbance to these areas, the Romanian government pays up to four times the standard subsidy for ploughed fields and hayfields to those whose private or leased land falls within such areas. Mowing is only allowed in these areas during certain periods, but according to the mayor, the shrubs must be cleared.
The clearing of the hayfields from bushes came up when we asked why he had only declared a quarter of the actual support he had received personally until last year. ‘I don’t think so… Did I forget?’ ‘I don’t know. I’ll look into it.’ ‘I usually report what I receive.’ After we got through these rounds of disbelief and denial, Sallai said he thought he only had to report the amount remaining after the cost of clearing the field.
We explained to him that he had to report his income on the form, not just the profit he made from it, but as an experienced filer of asset declarations, he should have known that. In any case, the fact that we brought up transparency had a positive outcome: in his asset declaration at the end of 2024, he listed RON 66,000 in APIA subsidies.
Does transparency corrupt the elections?
However, he has not yet fulfilled his promise to publish all documents of the local administration on the website, as required by administrative law. Examples of such documents include
- his own as well as the counsellor’s and the registrar’s declaration of assets and interests;
- agenda items, draft resolutions, resolutions, and minutes of local council meetings;
- the agenda and date of the meetings of the specialist committees, so that anyone from the community who wishes to do so can attend;
- mayoral decrees, building permits;
- the civil servants’ salary scale;
- the draft budget and the adopted budget.
All this should go back years, so that anyone (local residents, former inhabitants of Sic, newcomers, political supporters and opponents, even journalists) can trace who said what, what they decided and did in the affairs of the community and with its assets. Currently, only fragments from last year and the year before are available on the website and even those are not necessarily logically ordered. As a result, everyone mostly relies on the mayor’s verbal statements.
‘I’m aware that it’s not working; it’s not that I’m unaware. I’ve asked two or three times guys, did you make it, did you post it? I wouldn’t like to get in trouble because of it, because it’s not the way it’s supposed to be. There are shortcomings, but we will fix them, that’s for sure. So my plan is not to hide it, or that everyone would say or think that we have made it disappear or wanted things to disappear; that’s not true. […] It’s not our goal to make everything unclear and non-transparent’, said the mayor, when we confronted him with the fact that while previously a few years’ worth of local decisions and minutes had been posted on the local website,
by the beginning of 2024 the website got completely empty, all documents were removed.
There were at least three reasons why the mayor’s promise was not credible even then. We knew that his local political rivals had been trying for eight years to obtain the minutes of council meetings, which should be public by default, by submitting separate requests for information. After that, the office began to publish the minutes.
We were also aware that a few weeks before our interview, János Sallai and the office he manages had received a warning from the prefect of Cluj County that the village registrar must comply with his legal obligation and publish the documents of the local council and the office on the village’s website. When we asked about this, the prefecture told us that, unfortunately, the administrative law doesn’t stipulate any penalties for incompliance.
The 2022 methodology of the information law lists several types of documents that must be published on the town hall’s website. This law at least gives citizens the opportunity to sue the public institution that failed to provide them with information. However, it is still up to the mayor to decide whether to initiate disciplinary proceedings against the employee who failed to disclose or send the requested documents to the applicant.
We knew from the public procurement database that three months before last year’s local elections, the mayor’s office in Sic commissioned a company to update the local website. Neither the amount of RON 934 allocated for this purpose nor the prefect’s warning had much effect on the project and six months later the website was still completely empty. The website has been updated this year, but it contains far fewer official documents than before it was emptied last year.
The mayor communicates with residents via Facebook. He posts public information on the SIC Info page. He regularly announces council meetings, but no longer reports on decisions. However, he posts the annual expenditures and planned budget items in an easily understandable manner. He no longer reports on specific payments, even though some of the larger items have interesting, even family-related connections.
Money farming on the local hayfields
One source of revenue for the local budget of Sic comes from the leasing of communal pastures. Several individuals and companies are involved in livestock farming and about two dozen of them have established a livestock farmer cooperative. The cooperative was established in 2013 by Dániel Gergely Márton because at that time it was necessary to bid for municipal pastures. As a large-scale farmer, he outbid everyone else, but he did not need all of them and did not want to antagonize the other breeders, he explained when we asked him about it.
However, he had to admit in the cooperative people who he knew did not keep animals, otherwise the mayor’s office would not have signed the lease agreement with the cooperative. The cooperative was used, Dániel said quite openly, to receive the APIA subsidy, which was used to pay the rent for the pastures. Dániel left in 2016, unable to tolerate the grumbling of the other members, even though he had put the pastures and the cooperative in order by then.
From then on, APIA has also tightened the conditions for receiving subsidies: some of the sheep had to be transferred to cooperative ownership so that the cooperative itself could farm, rather than just receiving state subsidies. In 2016-17, there was a minimal amount of business turnover. However, there has been no sign of farming since then. The public balance sheets reveal that the cooperative has had a yearly RON 200,000-400,000 revenue and zero business turnover.
In other words, the cooperative does not sell animals or dairy products and most or all of its income comes from state subsidies. Half to two-thirds of the income remains as profit.
Sándor Filep has been running the cooperative since 2017. He said they sell lambs, but explained that sales are weak and the cooperative is weak. He could not say why their sales do not appear in the accounts. He confirmed that the only members of the cooperative now are those who actually keep animals.
A rock solid business from public money
Sándor Filep is not only a livestock farmer, but also a construction contractor. Several of his companies have signed contracts worth substantial sums with the mayor’s office. For example, he received RON 1.5 million between 2020 and 2022 for concreting the stream bed without a water permit, as we reported in our article exposing unauthorised investments.
We saw for ourselves that his company continued the concreting works on the stream bed even after the water authority had stopped the work but had not yet issued the flood protection permit. When we suspected that he was building one of his houses without a permit, as we did not see an information board at the construction site, he replied that he had been working on rebuilding that house for three years and that the board must have disappeared during the process.
We compared the public balance sheets of his two companies, Filbeton and Beton Fil, with the data available on the public procurement portal. These show that Filbeton Sic Construct Ltd.’s annual revenue between 2019 and 2023 is consistently lower than the amounts won in public procurement. It is highly likely that it had no orders other than municipal works. (The price of these was not always paid in the year in which the company won the contract, hence the discrepancy.) Beton Fil is a company with much lower sales, where no such clear correlation was apparent.
András Zsoldos is also a member of the management of the livestock farming cooperative. His company, Zsoldos Farm, has signed a contract with the mayor’s office this year for various earthworks worth around RON 150,000, as revealed by the public procurement portal.
It had to be propped up, yet investigated
Mayor János Sallai admitted that he likes to hire Sándor Filep because he works cheaply and does not ask for an advance payment. Sándor Filep said that the town hall paid him for all the work he contracted to do. Sallai, however, wanted to illustrate how careful he is with public money by not paying in full for the small retaining wall that holds back the slippery ground on the alley leading to the old retirement home that has never existed, where his wife’s company now theoretically operates.
Sándor Filep’s companies have built several concrete and stone retaining walls and parking lots in Sic over the past five years. No one questions the need for parking lots near churches and parishes, but an investigation has been launched because of the retaining wall around the Reformed parish. Márton Csorba filed a complaint because, in his opinion, the local government spent public money on private property.
The older retaining wall was constantly cracking and had become dangerous, explained minister Márton Sallai. The county road winds between the Reformed church and the parish in the centre of Sic, where the parish house is a few meters higher than the road level. The at least one hundred meter long retaining wall holds the ground below the parish so that it does not collapse onto the county road.
The parish did not have the money to replace the crumbling retaining wall, but the municipality let it know that it would build the retaining wall with public funds if the parish requested it and if it could be built 2.5 meters further in to create a parking lot for the congregation members.
Márton Sallai took the relevant parish documents with him when he went to be questioned by the National Anticorruption Directorate. The investigation was still ongoing in the summer of 2022, but he has not received any further information since then. When we contacted the National Anticorruption Directorate, they replied that they had handed the case over to the prosecutor’s office in Gherla, which has not provided any information either.
Márton Csorba has been fixated on him for years,
because even though he wanted to be mayor, he wasn’t elected, says Mayor Sallai about every official matter we brought up. János Sallai Jr. and Sándor Filep also accused Csorba of hindering every investment out of envy.
Both Sallai Jr. and Sr. accuse him of other things, but when we asked them why they didn’t report these matters to the authorities if they were criminal offenses, they just kept repeating that they would then have to deal with Csorba all the time. According to Csorba, they are making things up and spreading rumours about him that they cannot prove.
Csorba gives him enough work, says Mayor Sallai, as he has had to search for documents for several investigations, which the office sometimes gets back from the police and the prosecutor’s office and sometimes does not. He says that the authorities do not even notify him when they close a case in which he has no criminal liability.
‘I’m not the kind of person who is constantly thinking about reporting this or that. Maybe the time will come. And it will definitely come because he’s been doing this for thirty years,’ said the mayor about Csorba and his own intentions.
Pride and justice
Csorba accuses the mayor of wrongdoing in a gazillion other cases. Here, we have only written about those cases in which the mayor’s handling of public funds and other public assets is truly questionable, and about which we have been able to obtain information from official and other local sources.
We took the same approach with Márton Csorba, whom the mayor mentioned in connection with a tax fraud case and a case involving public debt.
Unlike János Sallai, Márton Csorba described both incidents in detail. He received a suspended sentence of one and a half years in the VAT fraud case because his accountant had transferred fictitious invoices through the eight companies she worked for, including Csorba’s and then reclaimed the VAT. None of the company managers knew about this, Csorba said, but they had to pay the fine because a company manager is responsible for everything that happens in his company and must know everything. The mayor’s lawyer attended every hearing in this case, Márton Csorba noted.
The other case began when Csorba was still a local councillor. According to Sallai, he was absent a lot, so they removed him from the council. Csorba says he did not attend the meetings because at that time they did not send them the agenda items in advance, so he did not know what he would have to decide when he went there. The council voted to have him removed and he challenged this decision in court.
Csorba lost the lawsuit, so he was ordered to pay the court fees, which he has refused to do ever since because he considers the decision unfair. He says that if the office needs the money, it should initiate enforcement proceedings against him, which the office has not done so far.
In addition, Márton Csorba celebrates Bartholomew’s’ Day every year on 24 August at the monument in Sic together with the mayor, local councillors and county leaders of the DAHR.
The festive speeches are, of course, about new beginnings because although the Tatars ravaged Sic on Bartholomew’s’ Day in 1717 and killed almost all of its inhabitants, the community was able to get back on its feet, among other things by mining the salt beneath its feet. How to face and overcome the moral crisis caused not by an external enemy but by the decisions of its own leaders is a question that the proud community of Sic still has to answer.
This article was produced as part of the 2025 Bertha Challenge Fellowship.
