Court rules in favour of the public in our case against the state railway company that hid its contract

The state railway’s maitainance subsidiary tried to withold a 900 million HUF contract on the grounds that it “contains personal data that are subject to limited disclosure for GDPR purposes, as well as business secrets”. The court ruled, however, that MÁV FKG Kft. was managing public property and was therefore obliged to hand over the document to Átlátszó.

In 2023, MÁV FKG Kft., a subsidiary of MÁV responsible for track maintenance, concluded a contract worth nearly HUF 1 billion with the private company ZELE-BAU Kft. for various works related to railway track maintenance, renewal and construction in the Szeged Division. We sought to find out what the company had done for this money.

As MÁV FKG Ltd. did not publish the contract, we requested it by a public interest request for information: by e-mail in March 2024. In their reply, the company sent us a link where they believe our question will be answered.

However, the link points to a list of contracts concluded by MÁV FKG Ltd. Namely, that in 2023, ZELE-BAU Kft. was contracted to carry out works in Szeged for nearly HUF 1 billion. However, the details we are interested in, the concrete works, are not included in the table.

János Lázár’s ministry opposed the release of the contract

In its reply to our data request, MÁV FKG Kft. also wrote, in addition to the link, that “ZELE-BAU Kft. on 17.04.2023 for the value of 650 000 000 HUF (1 625 737 EUR), Contractor’s framework contract in the field of railway track maintenance, renewal and track construction in the Szeged Division, and its amendment No. 1 concluded on 13.11.2023 – on the basis of which the value was amended to 949 000 000 (2 373 577 EUR) HUF and the scope of the contract to 30.04.2024 – we are not in a position to send, especially in view of the fact that

the documents contain personal data which are subject to limited disclosure for GDPR purposes and also business secrets”.

In other words, the state-owned company has refused to release the contract on the grounds of GDPR and business secrets, which would reveal how the public money of around HUF 1 billion was spent. We did not accept this objection and went to court to get the contract. Since then, almost a year has passed and the court has ruled with final effect that the public company’s spending of public money is public information. But let’s look at what happened during the lawsuit.

The record of the first instance judgment recorded that “The defendant is state-owned, the majority owner in terms of its structure is the Hungarian State. The defendant is maintained by the Ministry of Construction and Transport and the Hungarian State exercises its ownership rights through it. The Ministry may issue instructions in respect of all shareholders.”

But not because of us. The representative of MÁV FKG said.

“the obstacle to the settlement is that the maintainer is opposed to the claim.”

In other words, the Ministry of Construction and Transport, the ministry of János Lázár, prevented the release of the data of public interest and the swift conclusion of the lawsuit.

We won in court with a final judgment

The legal adviser, who was paid with public money, argued that “on the basis of the data published on the website, the news portal atlatszo.hu, which is linked to the plaintiff, was able to prepare and publish an article describing the defendant’s activities without publishing the specific contracts, and also provided the contact details of the latter”. But this statement is not true, and MÁV FKG is well aware of this.

This is why the court of first instance, and then the court of appeal, also found in favour of Átlátszó. The judgment stated that “The defendant is state-owned and performs a public function,

public property and is therefore obliged to provide copies of the documents requested by the plaintiff

with their full annexes, and cannot claim that the data requested to be disclosed contain personal data or business secrets which are subject to restricted disclosure for the purposes of the GDPR”. The court noted that Article 30(1) of the Info Law allows that if the document containing data of public interest does contain such data, it may be encrypted by making it unrecognisable. However, he stressed that ” The contractual data requested relate to the use of public funds, which also justifies the imposition of an obligation to disclose.”

After winning the case in the second instance, MÁV FKG Kft. finally sent the framework contract with ZELE-BAU Kft. The document was not concealed, i.e. it did not contain any trade secrets or personal data in breach of GDPR. So they lied about these during the trial.

However, we did not get an answer to our original question from the document sent to us, which specific works were carried out by ZELE-BAU Kft. in the Szeged Division for nearly HUF 1 billion. The MÁV company only sent us a framework contract, but not the specific calls for tender. In a new request for information, we have now asked for these too, but have not yet received them.

In the meantime, we asked János Lázár’s ministry why the release of the data was blocked and whether there were any personal consequences for withholding data of public interest through litigation. ÉKM did not reply.