People

Meet our Leaders

Mrs. Cecilia Kilin Co-chair

She spent nearly half of her forty years of public service as a statistician at the Central Statistical Office. She worked about the annual documents for the statistical registration and data provision of housing construction and housing closures. She organized the data provision processes, developed the methodology for data processing, and prepared official quarterly reports based on the collected data. She designed the individual pages of the annual housing statistical yearbooks, which contained print-ready tables produced using computer technology based on database data. She conducted on-site inspections in cooperation with the employees of the regional directorates of the Central Statistical Office and prepared a national summary report on the experiences. As an employee of the Headquarters of Hungarian Post, which also has authority, she participated in the trial operation of the national unified legal information system (JIR).Based on her experiences she developed a proposal and then a task plan for the computerized information system of postal rules. Later, she made a proposal for the necessary transformation of the statistical data provision procedure of the Budapest City Mayor’s Office. She participated in solving the deregulation tasks of the Office’s legal predecessor the Budapest Metropolitan Council, and in compiling the proposals. She participated of the task force investigating the corruption scandal that came to light at the Budapest Municipality.

For most of her career she played a significant role in National Assembly of Republic of Hungary, giving information for the members of the Parliament, establishment and development of the Parliamentary Information System (PAIR). She provided answers for the MPs, mainly to their questions related to legislation and the rules of parliamentary work, primarly on current and past events in daily parliamentary work, and then – as head of the information department – she organized the updating and development of the MP’s and documents registration systems and also performed the professional coordination of legislative IT tasks. Under her leadership, the procedure and information system for informing members of the Parliament were developed, including also the legislative statistics systems. For nearly 10 years before her retirement, she also managed the processing of annual budget bills and the modifying proposals to them in a special IT system independent from the PAIR system.

For her decades of public service and for developing and leading the information system of the Parliament, the President of the Republic awarded her the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary in 2009.)

He acted as a pro bono lawyer for the registration of the Transparency International Hungarian Chapter Association (TIMTE) and was later elected as its Vice President. In cooperation with the West Berlin parent organisation, he became head of the task force investigating the corruption scandal that came to light at the Budapest Municipality. The final report was presented at a press conference in agreement with the Chief Notary. In the meantime, a second TI report was drafted at his suggestion and under his leadership, which included a concrete timetable for closing the legal loopholes.

Since 2007, he has been actively involved in the Transparency Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hungary and the Transparency Working Group of the Anti-Corruption Panel of the Department of Justice and Law Enforcement. In 2009, he launched the ‘Civilian Oversight’ scheme, which aims to provide civilian oversight of the effective use of public funds through the involvement of volunteers. The idea was supported by letters from the Office of the President of the Republic and the State Audit Office of Hungary. In 2010, he was a delegate to the Responsible Corporate Governance Committee of the Hungarian Chapter of the American Chamber of Commerce. On 23 March 2011, he participated as a founding delegate in the inaugural meeting of the Joint Venture Alliance’s Anti-Corruption Committee.Since 2011, he has been a Geopolitical Council delegate to the Global Financial Integrity NGO Task Force, with the help of which he launched the financial security newsletter SecInfo.hu on 9 December 2011, the UN World Anti-Corruption Day. Since 2013, he has been involved in the Ministry of Administration and Justice’s Government Anti-Corruption Programme, where he has been involved in legislative drafting and opinion giving activities (Anti-Corruption Expert Working Group, Advocacy Sub-Group, Corruption Risk Assessment Working Group, Corruption Prevention Awareness Campaign Working Group).

As a civilian diplomat, he was a regular participant in the meetings of the UN ODC (Office on Drugs and Crime) anti-corruption conferences (Vienna, Doha, Marakesh). During István Tarlós’ term as Mayor of Budapest, he held integrity functions in several companies owned by the capital. After the entry into force of Government Decree 339/2019, he worked as a compliance consultant for a state-owned company. He is a member of the Hungarian Corporate Compliance Society.)

The Community

We are home to professionals from the fields of rule-making, inspection, law enforcement, engineering, prosecution, advocacy and judiciary, representing a wide range of companies, institutions, roles and experience levels. We put individual contributors and project managers on an equal footing. This applies to researchers, engineers, operations staff and many others. We take care of each other. That means cooperation and kindness. It also means being empathetic and paying attention to how we can be helpful to each other. It also means that we are speaking the truth.

 

If you are an expert, in the Geopolitical Council on Geopolitics, you can experience that you are not alone, you can find people with similar interests. Here, we all work fairly for the common good, and we talk openly with each other about everything – beginning with news of the day, to ideas for better ways of working, to the videos we make – in safety, with people who understand each other.