Hungarian tabloid Blikk reported on Saturday that one of the MVM Paks II Zrt manager’s laptop and several data storage devices had been stolen from a car which was broken into. The data related to plans for the expansion of Hungary’s sole nuclear plant, the paper said.
According to Blikk, the incident took place in Budapest as far back as May. The executive, whose identity has not been released, left the vehicle at the Belgrad rakpart embankment for a brief meeting. While the Paks director was gone, the robbers stole a bag containing the notebook and several external drives from the back seat of the car.
As the Budapest police force has launched an investigation, the energy company said in a weekend statement that it would not comment further until the police probe has been concluded. However, MVM later insisted that the laptop containing classified data related to the Paks nuclear power station, had the most up-to-date hardware and software protections
The opposition LMP and Együtt parties have called for the Hungarian Parliament’s national security committee to be convened to discuss the matter. Furthermore, they have demanded that the government report on what took place. In early June, Sergey Kirienko, head of Russia’s state-owned atomic energy company Rosatom, expressed his satisfaction with the preparations for the Hungarian Paks 2 project.