Hungarian President Pál Schmitt will not resign from his post, he said in Seoul on Wednesday.

Schmitt told MTI news centre that Tuesday’s report by the special university committee investigating the authenticity of his doctoral thesis has but confirmed his earlier resolution to continue in his post.
The president said that he saw the conclusions of the committee’s report as “a sort of satisfaction”.
Schmitt said he had not contemplated resignation “even for a moment” because he was convinced that his election had nothing to do with a doctoral thesis written 20 years ago but “different qualities” of his.
The president repeated his earlier position that he had written his thesis in 1992 “in line with the conditions and requirements of the time and with the best of my knowledge”.
On Tuesday, a summary of the committee report was published, which said that the 1992 Sports University’s assessment of Schmitt’s thesis contained discrepancies while being in line with regulations at the time. http://www.freehungary.hu/component/content/article/1-friss-hirek/870-investigating-committee-has-cleared-schmitt-of-plagiarizing.html
“The thesis is based on an unusually long word-by-word translation which was not revealed at the time whereas the assessment of this fact should have been part of the defence procedure,” the committee said.
From page 34 to 50, the thesis is completely identical with a paper written by German sports sociologist Klaus Heinemann, and another 180 pages are partly identical with the work of Bulgarian sports scientist Nikolay Georgiev, the committee said.
“If not an irregularity, it was certainly a formal mistake that the thesis is generally characterised by a lack of or bad referencing, which the thesis supervisor and the assessors should have pointed out during the preparations and in the pre-assessment phase,” the report said.
The Sports University made a mistake by not revealing these shortcomings and leading the writer to believe that the thesis had met the requirements, it added.

Source: MTI

Last Updated on Thursday, 29 March 2012 06:17