Atlatszo.hu wins freedom of information battle over the 5th district municipality

Municipality of the 5th district sued us for correction after our February article, ‘Billions for subcontractor buddies’. As we wrote, the district has spent large figures of public funds on the reconstruction of various buildings in recent years. Bau Holding 2000 Zrt, the company chosen to do most of this work is now under liquidation. This company also took part in a consortium with Reneszánsz Kőfaragó Zrt. which won public procurement tenders in 2009 with a 10-15% higher price than the calling for tender required. The municipality also tried to keep other construction industry firm Szirt Építőipari Kft’s contracts in secret. As a response to our freedom of information request we got a cheque of 1,218,760 forints to pay for scanning the documents.  After the district failed their lawsuit about the facts we claimed in our article, we took legal actions against the ’price’ of freedom of information. In this week’s first-degree verdict, Pest Central District Court set a price of 274 221 forints to scan the 30469 pages long documents in 15 days. 5^th district municipality also failed their second libel suit against atlatszo.hu on the article which investigated the process of spending hundreds of million forints on ‘fake civil organizations’.