{"id":691999,"date":"2026-01-12T22:54:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T22:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/691999\/"},"modified":"2026-01-12T22:54:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T22:54:10","slug":"oliver-varhelyi-denies-knowledge-of-alleged-spy-ring-run-from-his-office-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/691999\/","title":{"rendered":"Oliv\u00e9r V\u00e1rhelyi denies knowledge of alleged spy ring run from his office \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the time the reports<\/a> surfaced, V\u00e1rhelyi told<\/a> European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that he was \u201cnot aware\u201d of the alleged Hungarian efforts, a denial he repeated on Monday.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had no knowledge of this claim which was made in the press,\u201d he told MEPs in response to a question from Greens lawmaker Daniel Freund.<\/p>\n

Freund had asked the commissioner if he had known of any of the activities supposedly run out of the Hungarian permanent representation to the EU, which he worked at<\/a> from 2011 and ran from 2015.<\/p>\n

Hungarian officials working in the EU institutions at the time described<\/a> the network to POLITICO as an open secret in the Belgian capital.<\/p>\n

Following the media reports, Hungarian opposition leader P\u00e9ter Magyar \u2014\u00a0who also worked at the Hungarian permanent representation under V\u00e1rhelyi \u2014 accused him<\/a> of withholding information about his time as an ambassador.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn my opinion, Oliv\u00e9r V\u00e1rhelyi, the current EU Commissioner and former EU Ambassador (and my former boss), did not reveal the whole truth when he denied this during the official investigation the other day,\u201d Magyar wrote in a Facebook post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the time the reports surfaced, V\u00e1rhelyi told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that he was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":692000,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[2000,299,5187,41727,2190,140669,51417],"class_list":{"0":"post-691999","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-european","11":"tag-hungarian-politics","12":"tag-hungary","13":"tag-oliver-varhelyi","14":"tag-spying"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115884593220735468","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/692000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}