The chronicle of Eger Tobacco Factory
The chosen company
powerful forces gathered for the forthcoming struggle for supremacy. Nomination of a successor, according to the way authority was allocated at the time, was up to the Eger city party committee. The leaders of the Tobacco Industry Consortium would have been happy with either of the candidates. The county party committee favoured Jászi’s nomination, being impressed with his reliability, continuity and experience. The city party committee, impressed with the way the young chief engineer had successfully led the factory’s technical changeover, were backing Domán for the post. According to the rumours of the time, István Sipos, first secretary of the city party committee, fudged the ballot sheets a little, so that, although in the end he voted against Domán, following the orders of his superiors from the the county committee, Domán still emerged victorious when the votes were counted, scoring a narrow 6:5 victory. On 1st January 1970, at the age of thirty-four, he took over the directorship of the Eger factory. László Domán was a born leader, a success-orientated person, who directed Eger with acute business sense. This basic combination of personal qualities could equally well have made up the description of any successful whizz-kid on the other side of the Berlin Wall. In the minutes of a party union meeting held at the factory in 1964, the year of his arrival in Eger, we find transcripts of his words which give an interesting picture of his new and exciting way of thinking. “We aren’t in a position to make economies without eventually short-changing the customer,” he says. “The way things stand at the moment, there is nothing wrong with the technical side of things. It is in basic tasks that we fall short of the mark. In order A well-tried Sasib packing machine from 1968, with technician Mrs Tivadar Fiala (Magdi)
