Crime falling across the board, says public prosecution

Last week public prosecutor Peter Polt told Socialist politician Gergely Barandy — who had cited a report by the atlatszo.hu website alleging the number of rejected criminal complaints about graft had tripled since December, 2010 — that he had launched a national investigation into measures to combat corruption. Barandy also insisted that investigations had been dropped twice as often under Polt’s term of office as in the 2006-2010 period under the previous government.In its statement, the prosecution authority said that the website had drawn selectively from police and prosecution data. “Some of these findings — unsubstantiated and arrived at absent of a separate investigation — are unfounded and false,” it said.The website gives the impression that the prosecutor’s office exclusively acts on complaints regarding corruption and investigates them. “Rather, under the rules of the criminal procedure, it is the police that is the general investigative authority on such matters.” The prosecutor’s office only supervises the investigation of certain special cases, such those involving senior officials suspected of official corruption, the statement said.