Szervilis Bingó

János Áder

Corruption

Consistently signed Fidesz's most illiberal legislation into law, including the ban on legal gender recognition despite clear human-rights concerns. Served as a rubber stamp for the regime's constitutional changes rather than exercising the presidential check function.

László Baán

Cultural Capture

László Baán, director-general of Hungary's Museum of Fine Arts, was appointed government commissioner on 1 October 2011, and ministerial commissioner from August 2012, to lead the Liget Budapest project, a museum-quarter development in Budapest's City Park. The project's estimated cost rose from 10-15 billion forints in 2011 to roughly 70 billion forints for the museum quarter alone by 2013 (about 120 billion forints including park redevelopment), while openings originally planned for 2018-2020 slipped by years. The project drew criticism from the Hungarian chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) for lacking impact studies and prior professional consultation, from architects including Erick van Egeraat over the City Park site and concept, and from a 2015 district petition that gathered 15,000 signatures against building in the park, though a court blocked the resulting referendum. In September 2025, Hungary's Public Procurement Decision Committee fined the Museum of Fine Arts more than 50 million forints for buying six artworks worth a combined 1.879 billion forints without a public tender. Baán called the tender requirement unrealistic and said the museum would pay the fine while disputing the underlying EU rule.

István Bács

Corruption Nepotism

Fidesz politician István Bács served for years as Deputy Mayor of Érd, overseeing the city's kindergarten construction projects. A June 2022 Átlátszó investigation found that between 2011 and 2019, Érd's municipal government and mayor's office signed contracts worth over HUF 200 million with Inteszkomp Kft., a company owned by Attila Argyellán, a close associate of Bács; only four of the 28 contracts involved a genuine public procurement procedure, with the company often winning as sole bidder or through non-advertised negotiated procedures. In March 2023, the Budapest Court of Appeal issued a final ruling — rejecting Bács's defamation lawsuit against Átlátszó — confirming that Bács is indeed related to the owner of General-Invest Bau Kft., a company that won more than HUF 1 billion in Érd kindergarten construction tenders. The same kindergarten construction projects came under investigation by the EU's Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) starting in November 2022, after Érd Mayor László Csőzik filed a police report; as city hall communications director László Ferenc stated, "we received confirmation that OLAF accepted it." In 2021 it also emerged that Bács had given his own company, Aequivalentia Kft., a HUF 71.5 million member loan that he failed to disclose on his wealth declaration; when an Átlátszó reporter pressed him on it, Bács replied that the reporter was "a lying, malicious, manipulative, thoroughly corrupt dirty communist who would sell his own soul."

Gyula Balásy

Corruption Propaganda

Gyula Balásy built a de facto monopoly over state communications tenders through his companies Lounge Design and New Land Media, with procurement conditions routinely tailored to match his firms' specific capabilities. His companies served as the primary contractors behind the government's major propaganda campaigns, including national consultations and waves of anti-EU and anti-migrant billboards, all funded at prices that vastly exceeded market rates. Former Student Loan Center CEO Péter Magyar publicly accused Balásy of delivering substandard work at several times the going market price, pointing to systematic overpricing of public contracts. The cumulative effect has been the concentration of billions in state communications spending within a single Fidesz-aligned group, crowding out genuine competition and directing public funds toward politically motivated advertising.

Zoltán Balog

Corruption

Investigations and insider sources show he strongly pushed for the controversial presidential pardon that toppled Novák, protecting a church-linked abuser's accomplice. The scandal exposed how political and religious power networks intersect to shield perpetrators in the Orbán system.

István Balsai

Nepotism Corruption

István Balsai, who served as Minister of Justice from 1990 to 1993 and later worked as a Fidesz member of parliament, was elected to the Constitutional Court in 2011 by the Fidesz-KDNP two-thirds majority — the same year the governing coalition unilaterally scrapped the earlier practice of seeking cross-party consensus in judicial nominations. A 2015 joint investigation by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the Eötvös Károly Institute and TASZ, which analyzed 23 significant Constitutional Court rulings from 2011-2014, found that "Balsai István and Juhász Imre decided exclusively, or wrote dissenting opinions, in ways that served the government's interest" — meaning that in the cases examined they ruled or dissented in line with the government's position 100 percent of the time. According to the report, this pattern intensified after 2013 once the single-party-appointed majority took hold, ruling in the government's favor in 10 of 13 examined cases. Balsai's career path — moving directly from a governing-party political career into a seat on the Constitutional Court — is a documented example of Fidesz-KDNP placing its own former officials at the top of the judiciary. The findings come from a professional analysis by civil-rights organizations; no court has found him guilty of any crime.

Zsolt Bayer

Propaganda

Zsolt Bayer, a founding member of Fidesz, has spent decades as one of Hungary's most prominent purveyors of hate speech, insulated from serious consequence by his close personal ties to the governing party. His writings about Roma people, in which he called them 'animals' unfit to live among humans, helped mainstream extreme racist rhetoric from within the ruling party's inner circle. During the refugee crisis he described all male refugees over fourteen as 'potential terrorists', lending intellectual cover to the government's xenophobic communications strategy. Despite repeated hate-speech fines and an international outcry that prompted other Hungarian public figures to return their own state honours in protest, Bayer himself was awarded a state decoration — a clear signal that such rhetoric carries no penalty within the system.

Balázs Bende

Propaganda

He was recorded telling newsroom staff that "this institution does not support the opposition alliance" and that their job is to help the government. He uses his show "Világ" to praise government policies and attack perceived enemies such as Soros. During the 2022 elections, he openly agitated for the government on air on the eve of voting using a taxpayer-funded channel. This has made him a symbolic figure in the reduction of public media to a party propaganda tool. His conduct fundamentally violates the principles of journalistic independence and public service media.

József Bódis

Academic Capture Nepotism

As secretary of state for higher education, innovation and vocational training, József Bódis directed Hungary's post-2019 university "model change," under which control of state-run institutions was transferred to asset-management foundations. Bódis himself was given the chairmanship of the foundation (UQA) that took over the University of Pécs, while simultaneously overseeing the entire process as secretary of state. Átlátszó documented that the model change replaced institutional oversight with personal control, and that performance indicators written into the foundations' contracts remained unknown to the university community for extended periods. A 2023 legal amendment allowed Bódis to remain an employee of the University of Pécs past retirement age even while chairing the board that was formally his employer's governing body. He resigned the board chairmanship in October 2024, citing the university's insufficient "marketization" as his reason — in contrast to László Palkovics's resignation a week earlier from the Széchenyi István University (Győr) board, which was driven by anticipated stricter conflict-of-interest rules.

László Bodolai

Propaganda Troll Farm

As chairman of the foundation and holding company (Indamedia) that controlled Index.hu, media lawyer László Bodolai dismissed longtime editor-in-chief Szabolcs Dull in the summer of 2020, after more than two decades of Index's editorial independence. The removal triggered a mass resignation of the entire newsroom and is regarded as one of the most serious cases of politically-driven censorship in the Hungarian media market. In November 2020, Indamedia - co-owned by government-aligned media figure Miklós Vaszily - bought back Index.hu Zrt.'s shares outright, and Bodolai stepped down from the board, continuing to support the group as a media lawyer. Bodolai disputes this characterization, saying Index would have ceased to exist had he not intervened and that he never saw his actions as political pressure.

Dániel Bohár

Troll Farm Propaganda

Dániel Bohár is one of the most visible faces of the Megafon Center, operating at the front line of state-backed influence operations on social media. He is a regular participant in sponsored disinformation campaigns targeting opposition figures, the European Union, and the war in Ukraine, with activity that intensified sharply in the run-up to the 2024 European Parliament elections. Tens of millions of forints were channeled into emotionally manipulative 'war-scare' videos and smear content distributed through his platforms, reaching millions of views during the campaign period. An EDMO investigation found that sponsored disinformation ran rampant in Hungary during the EU election campaign, with Bohár's content playing a central role — and noted that social media platforms profited significantly from carrying it.

Zsolt Borkai

Corruption

Exposed in a yacht sex-and-corruption scandal involving an offshore-linked lawyer and Audi real-estate deals. The scandal became a symbol of how local Fidesz elites mix public office, EU-funded developments and private luxury. Eventually resigned but faced no criminal prosecution.

Imre Boros

Pro-Kremlin

Former minister Imre Boros served as Hungary's delegate on the Board of Directors of the Russian-dominated International Investment Bank (IIB), after the bank relocated its headquarters from Moscow to Budapest in 2019 at Viktor Orbán's invitation. A 2019 VSquare.org investigation reported that Boros had previously been accused of ties to the Communist-era state security service, which he denied. When asked about concerns that the bank could be used to embed Russian intelligence operatives, Boros told Direkt36: "The Russians would need to be very desperate to use this bank for espionage," and on the choice of headquarters location he said "part of the consideration is that it should be in a prestigious location while also fulfilling the requirements of modern office technology." The same reporting noted that governing-party MPs on parliament's national security committee asked no questions and sought no information about the bank. The US placed the IIB and three of its leading officials under sanctions in April 2023, after which Hungary withdrew from the institution — Boros remained the bank's senior Hungarian board representative throughout its entire Budapest period.

János Csák

Academic Capture Cultural Capture

Businessman and former ambassador János Csák sat on the board of trustees of the Maecenas Universitatis Corvini Foundation between 2019 and 2020 — the foundation created on 1 July 2019 that became the first in Hungary to take over a state university, Corvinus University of Budapest, under the government's 'model change' program. The state endowed the foundation with 10 percent each of the shares of oil company MOL and pharmaceutical firm Richter, a financing structure critics said was unpredictable: in 2020, for instance, MOL paid no dividend at all. Csák served as Minister of Culture and Innovation from 24 May 2022 to 30 June 2024, overseeing his ministry's full portfolio of foundation-run ('model change') universities, museums, and the National Cultural Fund. In July 2023, at the Tusványos festival, he compared the United States to 'a corpse whose nails keep growing' — physically active but with 'no soul left behind it' — a remark that drew wide attention. He resigned in June 2024, saying he had completed in two years the work planned for four; he was succeeded by Balázs Hankó.

Sándor Csányi

Academic Capture

Sándor Csányi, chairman-CEO of OTP Bank and one of Hungary's wealthiest businessmen with close ties to Viktor Orbán, became chairman of the board of trustees of the foundation that took over the former Szent István University (later renamed the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences, MATE) under the 'model change' scheme, effective January 4, 2021, alongside agriculture minister István Nagy, government commissioner János Lázár, and other government-aligned figures. This placed him at the head of the private foundation controlling one of the largest universities transferred out of state maintenance under the model-change program, which shifted public assets and governance to government-aligned businessmen and politicians. Effective June 15, 2026, he resigned from the board of trustees of both the MATE and University of Sopron foundations, citing that the foundations' scope of authority would shrink significantly while chairmanship duties would still require substantial time — a resignation that came alongside similar departures by Oszkár Világi (MOL) and József Váradi (Wizz Air), amid an opposition (Tisza Party) push to legislate changes to the KEKVA foundation model.

András Cser-Palkovics

Corruption Sports Grift

As Mayor of Székesfehérvár, András Cser-Palkovics has repeatedly presided over drastic cost overruns on major municipal projects without any apparent consequence for the contractors involved. In January 2019, he blamed the construction industry on Facebook for the fact that three flagship developments — a hospital expansion, a multi-purpose sports and events hall whose cost had ballooned from HUF 13.8 billion to HUF 25.7 billion, and a HUF 15.8 billion secondary-school campus — had become uncertain or unworkable due to overpriced contracting, stating: "public money can only be spent responsibly. Runaway investment costs must be stopped." Commenters on the post argued that responsibility also lay with the mayor for allowing a distorted, corrupted procurement system to take hold in the city. That same arena project would have cost HUF 25 billion in 2018, but the government judged it too expensive and shelved it; by 2021, rebranded as the Alba Aréna, it was won by Market Építő Zrt. — a company tied to businessman István Garancsi — with a net bid of HUF 35 billion, ten billion more than three years earlier.

László Csizmadia

Corruption Propaganda

László Csizmadia founded the Civil Összefogás Fórum (CÖF) and chairs the board of its charitable arm, CÖKA, the organization behind the pro-government mass rallies known as the Peace Marches. In 2017 it emerged that the state-owned utility MVM had given CÖKA 508 million forints in 2016; Csizmadia said the money went toward a 'civic mission,' including campaigns promoting personal income-tax donations, but MVM refused to disclose the sponsorship's precise terms even in response to a data-protection request. The organization had previously received funding from Fidesz's own party foundation (40 million forints in 2012, 20 million in 2013). In April 2021 Csizmadia requested and received a further 25.4-million-forint (gross) sponsorship from the Hungarian Development Bank (MFB), approved unanimously by its board within a day, under terms that allowed expenses incurred up to 30 days before the contract was even signed to be claimed. The pattern - opaque support from state companies and a state development bank flowing to a self-styled independent civic organization - is a textbook case of how Hungary's government-aligned civil sector is publicly financed.

Dániel Deák

Propaganda Troll Farm

Dániel Deák appears as an ostensibly independent lead analyst for the XXI. Century Analysis Center in pro-government media, while openly acknowledging that his Facebook posts are advertised by the Megafon Központ - over 114 million forints' worth, according to reporting on him. Deák defended the arrangement by saying Megafon runs on 'donations,' naming businessman Rákay Philip as its main backer, a claim undercut by later, court-confirmed reporting establishing that Megafon was substantially funded with public money. The scheme's core feature is that ostensibly grassroots, independent commentators receive large, non-transparent advertising subsidies to amplify pro-government content on social media. Deák regularly appears as an analyst in state and pro-government outlets without his appearances consistently disclosing his financial relationship with Megafon.

Szilárd Demeter

Cultural Capture

Writer Szilárd Demeter was appointed head of the Petőfi Literary Museum (PIM) in December 2018, made permanent from 1 February 2019, and reappointed for another five-year term on 1 December 2023. In August 2019 he was also named ministerial commissioner for the integrated development of Hungary's book sector and literary collections, a role that added a monthly gross 650,000 forints and an official car to his museum director's salary — at a time when the National Széchényi Library was running a 640-million-forint deficit and its IT librarians were leaving one after another for better-paid private-sector jobs. In a November 2021 Telex interview, Demeter said he would 'throw eighty percent of Hungarian literature in the trash' and made dismissive remarks about theatre. Writer Gergely Péterfy, in an HVG op-ed, called these statements the kind no institutional director could make about their own field in any civilized country, framing Demeter's leadership of PIM as installed for political loyalty rather than professional standing.

Tamás Deutsch

Nepotism Corruption

Tamás Deutsch, a founding Fidesz member and MEP, is vice president of the Hungarian Olympic Committee and president of the National Federation of Sports Associations (SOSZ), a post he took over in 2015. According to Népszava and 444.hu reporting from summer 2026, Deutsch is the last of the leading Fidesz politicians who once headed sports federations: János Lázár (tennis), Lajos Kósa (skating), Szilárd Németh (wrestling) and Domokos Schneller (cycling) all resigned their posts once state funding that had flowed automatically to their federations shrank or froze after the change of government. The reporting describes a sixteen-year pattern under Fidesz rule in which government-aligned politicians were placed atop sports federations as a guarantee that state funding would reach a given development project or event - with Deutsch, as of 2026, the last embodiment of that arrangement.

Egon Dienes-Oehm

Corruption

Egon Dienes-Oehm was elected to the Constitutional Court in 2011 as the KDNP's nominee, after Fidesz-KDNP unilaterally changed the nomination rules in 2010 to eliminate the previous practice of seeking cross-party consensus. A 2015 joint analysis by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the Eötvös Károly Institute and TASZ, examining 23 significant Constitutional Court decisions from 2011-2014, found that Dienes-Oehm "even before the new judges gained a majority, made decisions that were almost exclusively aligned with the government's presumed interest." According to the report, this pattern intensified after 2013 once the single-party-appointed majority took hold, ruling in the government's favor in 10 of 13 examined cases, in contrast to the more power-limiting record of judges appointed under the earlier consensus system. The findings come from a professional analysis by civil-rights organizations; no court has found Dienes-Oehm guilty of any crime.

László Domokos

Corruption

László Domokos led the State Audit Office (ÁSZ) from 2010 to 2022, a period in which the body repeatedly imposed severe fines on opposition parties while consistently finding nothing to fault in Fidesz-KDNP's finances. The best-known case is Jobbik's 2017 penalty: the ÁSZ ruled the party had accepted 331 million forints in prohibited support through discounted billboard placements, leaving it 663 million forints poorer overall — more than its annual revenue — while other opposition parties such as the Democratic Coalition (DK) were fined over discounted office rents. ÁSZ decisions carried no avenue for judicial appeal, since Parliament cannot be sued, leaving its rulings unreviewable by courts. Domokos did not disappear from public life after his ÁSZ term ended: in 2025, Minister Tibor Navracsics hired him for 2.7 million forints a month to 'audit' the finances of opposition-led Budapest's municipal government, after the state had seized 10 billion forints from the city's accounts. When confronted on the street by an activist about the audit, Domokos refused to comment, claiming he is not a public figure — despite being paid public money for a politically sensitive public function.

György Dörner

Cultural Capture

Actor György Dörner was appointed head of Budapest's Új Színház (New Theatre) by Mayor István Tarlós, effective 1 February 2012. Once it was announced, the far-right biker group Gój Motorosok said they would attend the theatre's opening performances as a group — an announcement Dörner publicly welcomed, saying 'Let the bikers come, let them buy subscriptions.' His directorship was renewed in 2016 and again in 2021; on the latter occasion Human Resources Minister Miklós Kásler appointed him for a further five years from February 2022, even though the theatre building is owned by the City of Budapest — full maintainer authority and employment decisions rest with the national ministry rather than the municipality. He received the Kossuth Prize in March 2020. Following the 2026 change of government, the new state secretariat for culture introduced mandatory leadership competency assessments and a 'zero tolerance' policy on workplace abuse on 31 July 2026, and opened public competitions for the director's post at both the Madách Theatre and Új Színház — leaving Dörner's decade-and-a-half tenure uncertain at the time of writing.

Flórián Farkas

Corruption

Flórián Farkas, president of the Lungo Drom Roma advocacy organization and former head of the National Roma Self-Government (ORÖ), personally signed a framework agreement with Viktor Orbán in 2011 for the EU-funded "Bridge to the World of Work" employment program, whose budget was cut from 5 billion to 2.5 billion forints after controversies, with the ORÖ receiving 1.5 billion of it. OLAF's investigation concluded in October 2018 and referred its findings to the Chief Prosecutor's Office, yet Hungary's tax authority (NAV) still had not identified anyone responsible for the project's irregularities four years on, while the government ultimately covered the ORÖ's losses with 1.3 billion forints in central funding. In a separate 6-billion-forint EU-funded project ("Path to Vocational Choice"), prosecutors opened a bribery investigation in 2016 after ORÖ representatives alleged Farkas paid them for loyalty; twenty representatives reportedly received monthly 250,000-forint "mentor" payments without doing real work. As of 2017 the investigation had led neither to charges nor even to Farkas being questioned as a witness, and Fidesz signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Lungo Drom shortly afterward. Farkas himself denied any disputed matter could be linked to him personally, and no charges were ultimately filed against him — making the case an example of unaccountable EU-fund management by organizations built around him, rather than a personal conviction.

Sándor Farkas

Corruption

Fidesz MP Sándor Farkas, deputy chair of parliament's agriculture committee, owns 37 percent of, and chairs the board of, Kinizsi 2000 Mezőgazdasági Zrt., a company that a 2015 444.hu investigation found had received HUF 3.8 billion in state agricultural subsidies between 2007 and 2015. Alongside the subsidies, the company also obtained state land: in one year alone it was granted 151.5 hectares without any tender being announced. The company additionally received HUF 44.5 million for the Kinizsi Park, co-owned by his wife, and HUF 50 million for an equestrian tourism complex under the Széchenyi Plan. A December 2014 Átlátszó article listed Farkas among Fidesz MPs who obtained a combined 151 hectares of state land across 56 separate parcels near Nyírbátor without any tender process; asked about the quality of the larger plots, Farkas replied: "There were some like that, but very poor-quality land that nobody wanted." The article noted that area-based subsidies alone brought the company more than ten million forints a year from land acquired without competitive bidding.

Sándor Fazekas

Corruption Nepotism

Sándor Fazekas headed Hungary's agriculture/rural development ministry from 2010 to 2018, the body responsible for running the country's largest post-transition state farmland lease auctions. An Átlátszó investigation found that the law firm of the minister's personal advisor, Péter Kovács (KPZ), received monthly retainers of several hundred thousand to a million forints from the Agricultural Chamber for land-policy coordination work, while separately billing Fazekas's ministry HUF 25 million in 2012 and HUF 12 million in 2013; Kovács also personally represented Fazekas in a political lawsuit. Regarding the 2015 Hortobágy land lease auctions, Átlátszó documented that the family of another Fazekas advisor, the Kobzas, received roughly HUF 103.6 million in state subsidies over the four years since 2010, even though their company's total revenue was only about HUF 30 million — the land they farmed grew from 65–70 hectares to more than 200 hectares. In the same auction round, the family of a separate beneficiary, Péter Kun, received a combined roughly HUF 470 million in subsidies since 2010. The cases document that the minister's narrow circle of advisors and associates obtained disproportionate benefit from the state land allocation processes his own ministry supervised.

Péter Fekete

Cultural Capture

As state secretary for culture from 2018 to 2022, Péter Fekete oversaw Hungary's cultural institutional system, including the operation of the National Cultural Fund (NKA) and the appointment process for theatre and museum directors. As a ministerial commissioner he personally helped Attila Vidnyánszky take over the National Theatre in 2012, and later as state secretary worked alongside him for years while Vidnyánszky chaired the Theatre Arts Committee that rules on theatre director applications — a relationship press reporting flagged as a potential conflict of interest. In late 2019, after leaked government plans to centralize cultural-institution funding triggered public protests (a demonstration at Madách Square), Fekete denied that closing the NKA was under consideration, while stating that if the state provides significant funding to an institution it must also exercise control over it. Retrospective press coverage on his departure noted that, lacking independent ministry-level status, his tenure's legacy was largely protocol-level rather than substantive structural reform, and that the cultural-funding system (MMA, NKA, NFI) remained fragmented.

Zoltán Fekete-Szalóky

Propaganda

Zoltán Fekete-Szalóky became a central figure in Index's transformation following the oligarchic capture of Hungary's most-read news portal. He openly acknowledged that Lőrinc Mészáros — the billionaire oligarch closest to Viktor Orbán — is among the financial backers of Index, while continuing to present the outlet as an independent voice. His tenure has been marked by fawning, PR-style interviews with regime-aligned businessmen, most notoriously a piece with László Szíjj that media analysts described as a case study in sycophantic journalism. The result is a portal that retains the reach and brand credibility of a legacy independent outlet while increasingly embedding propagandistic content — a model far more effective than overtly state-run media.

János Fónagy

Corruption

As Secretary of State for transport policy at the Ministry of National Development, János Fónagy defended the government's decision to classify for ten years the contracts and feasibility study behind the Chinese-loan-financed Budapest–Belgrade railway. When journalists asked about the project's payback period — which experts estimated at up to 2,400 years — Fónagy responded: "The figures in your questions and the payback period you raise can at best be considered speculation; the estimates published in the press are entirely without foundation." Under a law passed by the Fidesz–KDNP supermajority, the government withheld the contracts and related documents for the roughly HUF 700 billion investment — 85 percent of it financed by a Chinese loan — from public disclosure for ten years. As a result, neither the real costs nor the payback calculations could be independently verified by the public or press for years.

Balázs Fürjes

Sports Grift

As the government official responsible for Budapest development, Balázs Fürjes oversaw construction of the Puskás Ferenc Stadium, whose net cost ultimately reached 150 billion forints (other estimates put the gross cost at 190 billion), after which a further 11.1 billion forints was allocated in 2019 for improvements to its surroundings ahead of the European Championship - despite Fürjes having assured the public in April that the facility would not become more expensive before handover. For the multi-purpose arena planned for the handball European Championship, bids ranged from 115 to 160 billion forints, which by Fürjes's own account caught the government by surprise, prompting it to impose a spending cap. Fürjes publicly described the Puskás Aréna as a "medium-priced stadium," citing international comparisons.

István Garancsi

Corruption

Construction and energy entrepreneur István Garancsi — owner of football club Videoton FC and the figure behind Market Építő Zrt. and the MET Group — is routinely identified in Átlátszó's reporting as "the prime minister's billionaire friend." In November 2020, his company Market Építő Zrt. asked Budapest's municipal government for a 90 percent discount on a construction area-use fee; the city ultimately approved the permit only on condition that the full fee be paid. In November 2023, Garancsi's media company ESMA Reklám Zrt., together with Sys IT Network Zrt., won as the sole bidder a tender for advertising rights on Budapest's lampposts; Átlátszó reported that the procedure bypassed mandatory concession rules, that rival firm Hungaroplakát Kft. said the eligibility criteria appeared tailor-made for a single company, and that although Budapest's General Assembly had rejected the proposal in May, Mayor Gergely Karácsony unilaterally approved it anyway in July. In February 2025, the Garancsi-linked Market Zrt. won a restricted tender — inviting only five companies — to renovate the House of Terror museum's façade for nearly HUF 300 million.

Gábor Gönczi

Propaganda

Co-host of TV2's "Tények", a flagship government propaganda programme that airs smear pieces against the opposition. He participated in 2018 and 2022 campaign videos explicitly announcing he would vote for Orbán and urging viewers to do the same, leading to multi-million forint election-law fines against TV2. He recently took part in Orbán-linked Digital Civic Circles (DPK), further blurring the line between news journalism and party campaigning. His conduct is a textbook example of the complete abandonment of editorial independence in public affairs journalism.

Gergely Gulyás

Propaganda

Key public face of the weekly "Kormányinfó" press conferences, which serve as a central instrument of government spin, opposition attacks, and reframing of scandals as conspiracies. He regularly defends controversial government positions toward the EU, NATO and Ukraine, portraying foreign criticism as attacks on sovereignty. As an intellectual architect of post-2010 constitutional changes, he played a key role in designing institutional reforms that weakened checks and balances and consolidated power. His conduct makes him a symbolic figure in the deliberate dismantling of the democratic institutional framework.

Árpád Habony

Propaganda

Widely credited as the architect of Fidesz's fake-news-driven, anti-immigration propaganda strategy. Later became co-owner of V4NA news agency and a key figure in consolidating hundreds of pro-government outlets into the KESMA conglomerate, centralising media control.

János Hajdú

Nepotism Corruption

János Hajdú, Viktor Orbán's former personal bodyguard and a special-forces police officer with no investigative or analytical background, was appointed director-general of the Counter Terrorism Centre (TEK) when it was founded in 2010 — a choice Direkt36 reported was criticized even then because he had previously had "a lot of experience in busting criminals, but not so much in investigation." TEK under Hajdú is linked to Hungary's use of NSO Group's Pegasus spyware: from 2018 onward at least four journalists (including two Direkt36 reporters), businesspeople and lawyers were surveilled with the tool, and even Hajdú's own deputy, police brigadier general Zsolt Bodnár, was targeted after Hajdú grew suspicious of him. In May 2024, TEK obstructed two Telex journalists covering a public forum held by Minister Péter Szijjártó in Kalocsa, with an officer questioning the reporters' camera serial numbers under the pretext of a "circulation alert." Hajdú then handled the journalists' subsequent complaint unlawfully — failing to inform them of investigative steps or grant access to case files — a decision a court struck down as final in May 2026, ordering TEK to conduct new proceedings. No court has found Hajdú guilty of any crime.

Tünde Handó

Corruption

Given exceptional powers to appoint, transfer and discipline judges, sidelining the National Judicial Council and breaching European standards on judicial independence. Created a centralised, politically controlled court administration that undermined the separation of powers.

Balázs Hankó

Academic Capture

As minister, Balázs Hankó was a key architect of the university governance reforms that prompted the European Commission to suspend Erasmus+ and Horizon funding for Hungarian institutions, directly harming tens of thousands of Hungarian students and researchers. Rather than seeking legal accommodation with Brussels, Hankó publicly framed the EU's concerns as politically motivated attacks, amplifying anti-EU sentiment domestically while the funding freeze deepened. He simultaneously professed to defend students' interests in press statements while blocking compromise arrangements that would have restored funding by relaxing government control over university boards. The pattern reflects a broader policy of replacing autonomous academic institutions with politically loyal boards, subordinating Hungarian higher education to the governing party's ideological agenda.

Zsolt Hernádi

Corruption

Zsolt Hernádi, chairman-CEO of Hungarian oil and gas group MOL, was sentenced in absentia to two years in prison by a Zagreb court in December 2019 for allegedly paying a €10 million bribe to then-Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader in 2008-2009 to secure MOL's control rights over Croatian oil company INA; Sanader was sentenced to six years in the same case. Croatia has kept an arrest warrant and a corresponding European arrest warrant against Hernádi in effect ever since, though both men deny the charges. In March 2026, Hungary's Budapest-Capital Regional Court issued a final refusal to recognize the Croatian verdict, meaning it cannot be enforced in Hungary; Hernádi faced no legal or professional consequences and remained MOL's chief executive through mid-2026. A June 2026 report described the outstanding warrant as having functioned as a useful lever of political control over Hernádi under the Orbán government, even as it allowed him to keep running the company.

Zsolt Homlok

Sports Grift Nepotism

Businessman Zsolt Homlok acquired a 60.41 percent majority stake in Szombathelyi Haladás football club in 2022 after marrying Ágnes Mészáros, daughter of oligarch Lőrinc Mészáros. The club's stadium, opened in 2017, ultimately cost 15.2-15.6 billion forints against an original budget of 8.8-9.6 billion, making it Hungary's most expensive provincial stadium at the time. After Homlok divorced Mészáros's daughter in 2023, his businesses - including his firm Vasútvill - lost access to contracts from the Mészáros business circle, contributing to the club's financial collapse in early 2024 (it could not pay wages in February 2024, and its equity fell roughly 153 million forints into negative territory). The situation was ultimately resolved not through the market but through government intervention: two government resolutions covered unpaid wages and operating costs after, in the words of county government commissioner Zoltán Vámos, the problem was brought before the prime minister.

Péter Hoppál

Cultural Capture Corruption

Péter Hoppál, a Fidesz MP and former State Secretary for Culture, has served as a loyal cultural foot-soldier of the regime, lending his name and public platform to campaign songs and personality-cult materials glorifying Viktor Orbán and the ruling party. Alongside this propagandistic role, he has faced questions about the misuse of public funds: his wife received millions of forints through municipal communications contracts for which no evidence of actual work delivered could be found. His political career has been defined by consistent support for bringing cultural institutions under tighter government control, in line with Fidesz's broader project of ideological hegemony over Hungary's public life. The combination of performative loyalty and alleged private enrichment through public office makes him emblematic of the system's incentive structure.

Jaber

Propaganda

He appears as a pro-government campaign face in Orbán-aligned formats including Mandiner and Digital Civic Circles, using video messages to attack Péter Magyar and defend the government's narrative. He helps personalise and soften Fidesz's hardline messaging for younger audiences, framing criticism of the regime as endangering fellow Hungarians. He has become a symbol of how pop culture and minority figures are integrated into Fidesz's communication ecosystem. His activities illustrate how the regime uses cultural figures to legitimise its political goals.

Gellért Jászai

Corruption

Gellért Jászai, as CEO of 4iG, has become one of the most politically connected business beneficiaries of the Fidesz system, presiding over a company whose explosive growth owes far more to state patronage than to market competition. Investigations by Direkt36 revealed that billions in state funds were secretly channeled into 4iG through private equity vehicles, enabling the company to acquire defence and telecommunications firms from the state under opaque conditions. The acquisition of Vodafone Hungary drew particular scrutiny, with analysts and critics questioning both the role of the state in facilitating the deal and whether the price reflected genuine market value. Jászai sits at the centre of a pattern in which a private company becomes systemically critical precisely because of its political connections, making it too embedded to scrutinise and too profitable to reform.

JCDecaux Hungary

Propaganda

JCDecaux Hungary operated in an outdoor advertising market where pro-government forces vastly outspent the opposition on billboard campaigns, systematically blurring the line between legitimate public information and partisan propaganda. The company provided space for CÖF and other government-aligned civil organisations (GONGOs) that deployed anti-EU, anti-migration, and anti-opposition messaging financed with public funds. At the same time, Fidesz-linked outdoor advertising firms offered extreme discounts exclusively to the ruling party, distorting the conditions for political communication. Multiple analyses have characterised the structure of this market and the opacity of advertising rates as a deliberate manipulation of the information environment.

Dániel Jellinek

Corruption

Dániel Jellinek, CEO of the Indotek Group, ranked as Hungary's 11th richest person on Forbes's 2021 list, with a fortune of roughly 140 billion forints. According to an Átlátszó investigation, figures linked to the NER political-business elite - including Jellinek - increasingly hide behind private equity fund managers instead of offshore companies to obscure real beneficial ownership: Jellinek, through Tarragona Holding, acquired Diófa Alapkezelő Zrt. from Takarékbank, which manages three funds (Nivala, Gordiusz, Főnix), while Indotek-Investments Alapkezelő Zrt., also under his control, runs three further funds (Lindewitt, Indotek-Ventures Alpha, Riverland). Through several layers of ownership - via the Kante Awa and Appeninn Nyrt. (Indotek Group) holding companies - Jellinek is also the ultimate owner of the Grand Hotel/Minaro Hotel Tokaj project, which, according to the official tender announcement, received 2,999,999,890 forints in state support through the Kisfaludy tourism-development program, while the Hungarian Tourism Agency's own website lists 3.4 billion forints in support and 5.8 billion forints in total costs for the same project — the two official sources do not match. No criminal proceedings have been brought against Jellinek; his business activity takes place within legal structures, through officially registered fund managers and companies.

Péter Pál Juhász

Corruption

Péter Pál Juhász ran the Szőlő Street reform institute in Budapest, a key facility in Hungary's state child-protection system, for over a decade, with house rules he personally signed prescribing a militarized regime that permitted physical restraint of residents, including gripping, holding down and pushing. He was arrested in late 2025 after security-camera footage showing abuse of residents surfaced, and was investigated on suspicion of human trafficking and forced labor. His successor, Károly Kovács-Buna, was also arrested on similar grounds after further abuse footage emerged. Seven suspects in total were taken into custody. Chancellery Minister Gergely Gulyás drew criticism for remarks widely read as victim-blaming and for defending punitive rather than pedagogical methods, underscoring years of failed state oversight of the facility.

Csaba Káel

Cultural Capture

As government commissioner for film and president of the National Film Institute, Csaba Káel oversaw a system in which the allocation of state film funding increasingly favoured projects aligned with government narratives. Under his leadership the domestic film industry underwent rapid expansion, its financial foundations resting heavily on state incentives decided through opaque processes. Multiple professional sources reported that screenplays by government-critical filmmakers were more likely to be rejected than those from politically neutral or sympathetic applicants. Káel's mandate expired in spring 2026; the NFI subsequently announced a suspension of film financing until the next change of government.

Monika Karas

Propaganda

Succeeded Annamária Szalai as head of the media authority, also with a Fidesz background. Presided over an authority where all council members were Fidesz nominees, cementing regulatory capture over public and commercial media. Broadcast licensing under her tenure consistently favoured government-aligned outlets. The authority's work became an instrument for the systematic marginalisation of independent media.

Miklós Kásler

Corruption

Miklós Kásler's Ministry of Human Resources (EMMI) oversaw Hungary's roughly 300-billion-forint 2020 ventilator procurement, in which the state bought over 17,000 units, a large share through a Malaysian-linked company network (GR Technologies SDN BHD), wiring some 176 billion forints to accounts in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore. When Transparency International Hungary filed a freedom-of-information request asking how many surplus ventilators had been resold, the ministry refused, claiming it held no database in the requested format and was not obliged to create one. A Budapest court ruled against the ministry, which appealed; it later emerged that part of the procurement's records had already been destroyed in November 2021, barely twenty months after the contracts were signed. Transparency International's legal director said the timing and manner of the destruction suggested the ministry may have been trying to evade its disclosure obligations and conceal the data.

KESMA (Közép-Európai Sajtó és Média Alapítvány)

Troll Farm Corruption

In a single day in November 2018, eight separate sets of documents were filed at Hungarian company courts through which government-aligned media owners donated roughly 500 media outlets - including county dailies, Origo and HírTV - free of charge to the newly created Central European Press and Media Foundation (KESMA). Weeks later the government issued a decree declaring the transaction of "strategic national importance," exempting it from substantive review by the Competition Authority (GVH). In January 2020 the Budapest-Capital Regional Court found that the GVH had issued its clearance certificate in an unlawful procedural form, without any substantive investigation; the GVH formally corrected the defect, then - since the government decree placed the merger outside the scope of competition law - rejected any renewed substantive review for lack of jurisdiction, meaning the media conglomerate never underwent real antitrust scrutiny. KESMA-affiliated outlets received 37 percent of the government's advertising budget in 2020, creating what has been described as an "enormous economic barrier" for independent competitors.

Máté Kocsis

Propaganda Cultural Capture

Máté Kocsis became one of the most recognisable faces of Fidesz's culture-war agenda through openly homophobic statements, most notoriously his declaration of 'Long live hetero pride!' mocking an opposition lesbian politician. He consistently used his public platform to attack independent media outlets and opposition figures, amplifying government propaganda narratives. As Fidesz Budapest president and parliamentary group leader, he played a central role in driving the party's hard-line cultural politics in the capital. His conduct forms part of a deliberate political strategy that narrows the space for tolerance and pluralism in public discourse.

András Koltay

Troll Farm

Law professor András Koltay was elected by parliament in December 2021 to a nine-year term as head of the National Media and Infocommunications Authority (NMHH) and its Media Council. A 2022 Media1 investigation found that transparency at the already low-transparency media authority declined dramatically under his presidency: the outlet went months without answers to basic public-interest questions, including about frequency-license decisions and concerns over the spread of Russian propaganda, whereas under his predecessor Mónika Karas the authority had at least eventually responded to press inquiries. In October 2025 the Koltay-led Media Council extended the licenses of the Mészáros Lőrinc-linked, government-aligned stations Best FM and Radio 1 for years – Best FM to 2033, and Radio 1 to 2035, with an option for Radio 1 to extend to 2042. The council thus plays a key role in keeping government-aligned broadcasters in a durable competitive advantage on the radio frequency market.

Zsófia Koncz

Propaganda

She won the 2020 Borsod-6 by-election to preserve Fidesz's constitutional two-thirds supermajority, nominated to replace her deceased father in a heavily personalised campaign. She secured her mandate on an uneven media playing field where government media deployed all resources to frame the race in Fidesz's favour. As a young Fidesz MP, she supports the continuation of illiberal constitutional and electoral rules that entrench the ruling party's dominance. Her mandate is a symbol of the intertwining of political inheritance and systemic reproduction.

Lajos Kósa

Corruption

Deeply entangled in the "Csenger inheritance" affair, where a housewife promised him control over a fictitious 1,300-billion-forint fortune. Documents show enormous sums were to be gifted to his mother and wife, raising unresolved questions about his judgement and potential corruption.

Gábor Kőszegi

Corruption

Gábor Kőszegi Árpád, a former official at the Hungarian National Trading House, ran SRF Silk Road Fund Holding as its authorized signing manager. On 20 April 2020 - the same day the Foreign Ministry signed a 17-billion-forint contract with Fourcardinal Kft. for 1,000 Chinese ventilators - Silk Road Fund acquired a 10% stake in Fourcardinal in exchange for seven-eighths of its profit. Fourcardinal and Silk Road Fund paid out roughly 18.2 billion forints in dividends to their owners before both were dissolved without a legal successor. Kőszegi is the brother-in-law of Péter Takács, Hungary's current health state secretary, a family link that only became public in 2025-2026 following opposition questions. No evidence has surfaced that Kőszegi or the Takács family personally pocketed any of the billions, which both deny. The case illustrates how opaque pandemic-era health procurement became, repeatedly channeling extraordinary profit through newly founded or newly repurposed intermediary companies that were later dissolved without successor.

Ferenc Kovács

Corruption

Under Ferenc Kovács, Fidesz mayor of Nyíregyháza since 2010, a 2015 Átlátszó investigation found that EU-funded municipal developments routinely billed construction materials at triple market prices — for example, benches worth HUF 85,000 were invoiced at HUF 311,000, and street lamps worth HUF 7,500 at HUF 637,000 — while the construction sites relied on mass undeclared labor, with workers paid roughly HUF 5,000 in cash per day, often without even knowing which subcontractor employed them. In March 2016, Átlátszó also documented that "on February 3rd, a previously unseen luxury Audi appeared in the mayoral office's parking lot," driven by the mayor's own chauffeur — the formal public-procurement tender for a new mayoral vehicle was only launched a week later, ultimately buying the same model for HUF 9.48 million. Together, the cases document a pattern in which the accounting of EU development funds and city procurement decisions preceded or bypassed the official procedural framework meant to govern them.

István Kovács

Troll Farm Propaganda

István Kovács (Kovács István Gergely) has run the Megafon Központ as executive director since its founding in 2020, an operation that trained and ran pro-Fidesz influencers on social media and regularly spent tens of millions of forints on advertising around elections - 72 million forints in a single week on one occasion. Kovács publicly denied in a radio interview that the organization had any formal ties to any political force, even as a court case he himself brought against Telex, which he lost, confirmed that Megafon was funded with public money channeled by the Prime Minister's Cabinet Office through the Batthyány Lajos Foundation. Between 2020 and 2022 Megafon received roughly 5.3 billion forints from sources that could not be identified. Kovács is also strategic director of the Center for Fundamental Rights (Alapjogokért Központ) and teaches political communication at Budapest Metropolitan University. Megafon Központ ceased operations in the summer of 2026, shortly after the parliamentary election.

Zoltán Kovács

Propaganda

Key public face of the anti-NGO "Stop Soros" and anti-migrant campaigns, defending punitive NGO taxes and spreading conspiratorial claims about a "Soros network" orchestrating migrant "attacks" and unrest across Europe. Served as the central figure in the government's international propaganda efforts to justify illiberal policies to foreign audiences. His role involved systematically misrepresenting civil society organisations as foreign agents rather than legitimate watchdogs.

László Kövér

Corruption

Uses disciplinary powers to impose massive fines and unprecedented bans on opposition MPs for protests, repeatedly violating free-speech rights as confirmed by the Strasbourg court. Blocks opposition events in Parliament including LGBTQ-related ones, and wields procedural powers to silence dissent.

Ákos Kozma

Corruption

Ákos Kozma has held the constitutional office of ombudsman — Hungary's Commissioner for Fundamental Rights — since 2019, a post meant to independently protect citizens' rights against the authorities. Civil-rights groups (TASZ, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee) documented that Kozma left their submissions unanswered for years and routinely declined to open investigations into sensitive matters. One of the best-documented cases concerns the restriction of assembly rights during the COVID-19 pandemic: the organizations asked him to investigate the assembly ban and police conduct toward protesters, and after ten months of silence Kozma announced he would not open an investigation, citing lack of jurisdiction — a claim the rights groups disputed, arguing jurisdiction is not lacking when the government itself is the legislator. The inaction had international consequences: in May 2022 the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) downgraded Hungary's ombudsman office from 'A' to 'B' status, stripping it of voting rights, after Kozma failed within a six-month grace period to demonstrate independence from the government. The international assessment specifically found that his office does not adequately address numerous human-rights problems, including violations affecting vulnerable ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ people, refugees and migrants.

Zita Kroó

Propaganda

She moved from Origo to PestiSrácok and other pro-government outlets, participating in a media ecosystem that routinely produces smear pieces against the opposition and civil society. She contributes to highly partisan online narratives that complement TV propaganda. She helps normalise a style of political journalism where government talking points are amplified uncritically as news. Her activities reinforce the gradual dismantling of media pluralism.

Gábor Kubatov

Corruption

Gábor Kubatov is the architect of the notorious 'Kubatov list', an extensive voter database containing personal data and political preference information used as the backbone of Fidesz's micro-targeted campaign strategy. The creation and operation of this database raised serious concerns about the extent to which state-collected data and party databases have become intertwined, particularly in localities where local administration and party networks overlap closely. A 2022 Human Rights Watch report documented patterns of personal data misuse during the election campaign in detail. Kubatov continues to serve as Fidesz party director and remains one of the defining architects of the party's electoral machine.

László L. Simon

Cultural Capture

Poet László L. Simon was a former Fidesz member of parliament and state secretary for culture when Minister Miklós Kásler — with Viktor Orbán's endorsement — appointed him director-general of the Hungarian National Museum effective 31 July 2021, after which he resigned his party-political posts. The appointment drew criticism from museum professionals: a museum staff member said L. Simon's inaugural speech suggested that science was not the museum's job, but rather the presentation of legends, tales, and myths. In his inaugural speech he argued the museum's job included presenting national myths and even figures proven not to have existed alongside scientifically verified fact, which some staff described as reducing the museum to a "fairy-tale museum." In November 2023, Culture Minister János Csák summarily dismissed him after the museum refused to check visitors' ID cards to enforce an age restriction on LGBTQ-themed images in a World Press Photo exhibition; L. Simon maintained the museum had fully complied with its supervising ministry's instructions and broken no law, saying he could acknowledge but not accept the decision. The episode documents both the practice of installing politicians as museum directors and how the institution became an instrument of the government's culture-war legislation.

Zsolt Lacza

Sports Grift Corruption

Hanley Service Kft., owned by Zsolt Lacza, became one of the biggest winners of the state school-swimming-pool ('tanuszoda') construction program, signing contracts within three weeks to build four pools and three gymnasiums, and collecting a total of 2.7 billion forints in state contracts within six months - yet by autumn 2017 the company had failed to hand over a single one of its projects, missing both the original and repeatedly revised deadlines. According to 444.hu, construction costs on one project rose 20 percent, or 57 million forints, above the original price, while the company - described as having 'appeared from nowhere' - had contracted to build ten facilities without completing a single one. Delays across the whole tanuszoda program cost the National Sports Centers (NSK) at least 760 million forints extra for facilities that missed their deadlines.

János Lázár

Corruption Nepotism

His family accumulated hundreds of hectares in state land auctions widely criticised as rigged. Later caught buying more land around his "castle" with undeclared loans and false ownership claims, raising serious integrity questions about a senior government minister.

Tamás Leisztinger

Corruption

Tamás Leisztinger, founder of the TriGránit real-estate development group, was once known as a businessman with left-wing ties, but by 2019 was being described as a NER-linked oligarch close to the Fidesz governing network. His companies repeatedly received non-refundable state grants, he entered the football-financing arrangement effectively mandatory for NER-connected business owners as head of football club DVTK, and he later sold the Hunguest hotel chain to Lőrinc Mészáros. At the end of 2022 the Hungarian state paid close to 4 billion forints for Ormosszén Zrt., a coal-mining company in which Leisztinger held a majority stake, in a deal whose terms the state asset manager MNV refused to disclose for months, citing disproportionate harm to business secrecy, until investigative outlet Átlátszó won a court case forcing disclosure. The case illustrates how even a businessman once seen as politically opposed to Fidesz became a beneficiary of opaque state spending under NER.

Gábor Liszkay

Propaganda

Orbán ally who built and led KESMA, the giant foundation that absorbed some 500 pro-government outlets in 2018, centralising control over much of Hungary's print, online and broadcast media. The transfer was declared a matter of "national strategic importance" to bypass competition review — one of the most brazen media capture operations in EU history.

Lotfi Begi

Propaganda

Performs at Fidesz party congresses and campaign events, providing entertainment and social-media content that builds a pop-culture halo around the ruling party. Appears in pro-government media as a celebrity supporter, legitimising Fidesz's politics among younger audiences. Part of a broader pattern of artists integrated into propaganda events that blur cultural life with party-state mobilisation.

Anikó Marsi

Propaganda

As co-host of Tények, repeatedly fronts segments mixing news with government messaging, including smear campaigns supporting Fidesz narratives. Appeared in multiple TV2 videos declaring she would vote for Orbán, explicitly urging viewers to follow, breaching basic impartiality standards and contributing to TV2's election fines. Continues to act as a high-profile face of a channel that routinely airs government war-scare spots and misleading "war or peace" framing as quasi-news content.

Zoltán Maruzsa

Cultural Capture

As state secretary for public education, Zoltán Maruzsa oversaw the 2020 revision of Hungary's National Core Curriculum (NAT), which dropped Imre Kertész — Hungary's only literature Nobel laureate — and his novel Fatelessness, along with Géza Ottlik's Iskola a határon, from the mandatory literary canon, while making Albert Wass's Give Back My Mountains! and Ferenc Herczeg's Az élet kapuja required reading and elevating József Nyirő to mandatory-teaching status. Press reporting documented that Wass wrote for far-right, pro-Arrow-Cross publications after World War II and was sentenced to death in absentia, and that Nyirő had in 1942 called for removing the 'Judeo-liberal' heritage from Hungarian culture and remained a supporter of Szálasi's fascist regime until 1945. Maruzsa publicly defended the changes as 'openly patriotic, child-centered, and 21st-century' curriculum content. The episode is a documented case of central government intervention reshaping the literary canon and controlling curriculum content.

Ádám Matolcsy

Corruption Nepotism

Ádám Matolcsy personally benefited from real-estate projects and investment transactions tied to the MNB foundations that the State Audit Office subsequently criticised for poor returns and opaque decision-making. Investigations by Direkt36 and Telex revealed that he built a luxury property portfolio including Dubai villas, partly through structures that relied on private wealth vehicles intertwined with central-bank-linked foundations. His activities are an illustration of how publicly funded institutional assets could be converted into profit-generating ventures for private actors within the system overseen by his father. Investigations connected to the affair made clear by 2025 that a portion of the MNB foundation assets had flowed to business circles connected through the family relationship.

György Matolcsy

Corruption Nepotism

As Governor of the Hungarian National Bank, György Matolcsy diverted hundreds of billions of forints from central bank assets into the Pallas Athéné foundation network, claiming the funds had 'lost their public nature'. These foundations were later linked to fraud suspicions, with State Audit Office proceedings and a criminal investigation launched in 2025 demanding detailed accountability. During his tenure, real-estate and investment projects emerged whose beneficiaries included companies connected to his son, raising serious conflict-of-interest concerns. Matolcsy effectively turned the central bank into a parallel development agency, spending institutional funds lavishly on prestige projects while the MNB's independence and credibility were severely undermined.

Mediaworks Hungary Zrt.

Troll Farm

Mediaworks Hungary Zrt. was originally created in 2014 by Austrian investor Heinrich Pecina after he bought the Hungarian newspapers Ringier and Axel Springer were forced to divest by the competition authority; in 2017 the company was taken over by Lőrinc Mészáros's business interests, and in 2018 it became the largest constituent company of the KESMA media foundation, forming the backbone of the pro-government media empire. According to Válasz Online's 2021 media map, Mediaworks operates 18 county dailies under a unified editorial structure, alongside national titles such as Bors, Metropol, Nemzeti Sport, Ripost, Magyar Nemzet and Világgazdaság, and weeklies and online platforms including Szabad Föld, Figyelő, Origo.hu and 888.hu. By 2021, the analysis found, government control had come to cover roughly half of the public-affairs media market, with Mediaworks-owned titles playing a decisive role in that dominance.

Megafon Központ

Troll Farm Propaganda

Megafon Központ is a pro-government influencer network partially financed by state-linked and oligarchic sources that spent well over a million euros during campaign periods spreading hostile narratives against the opposition, civil society, and the EU. During the European Parliament election campaign, EDMO analysts documented how sponsored disinformation content was run across social media platforms, generating substantial revenue for the platforms themselves. The organisation's funding is formally attributed to 'private donors', but investigative reporting has traced significant indirect public-money origins in its financial background. Megafon's operations represent one of the most visible examples of the deliberate poisoning of Hungary's information environment, fundamentally undermining the conditions for free elections.

Roland Mengyi

Corruption

Roland Mengyi, a former Fidesz MP and chairman of the Békés County Assembly, was sentenced to four years in prison for attempted budget fraud committed in a criminal conspiracy causing especially significant financial damage. Mengyi's name also surfaced in a separate matter: a 2018 NAV (tax authority) investigation into Public Sector Kft., a company providing services to the municipalities of Cece and Lajoskomárom in which Mengyi was also involved, found the company had "sold the exact same heart and circulatory patient club methodology to both municipalities," billing HUF 198,000 plus VAT per location and then invoicing both municipalities nearly identical amounts of HUF 2,242,500 gross for operational guidelines; NAV ultimately closed that investigation on the grounds that "due to the passage of time, it is now impossible to determine how many hours were actually spent" on the work, meaning that matter never resulted in accountability. Mengyi entered the Kecskemét penitentiary in January 2020 and was released in December 2021 after serving roughly 22 months, benefiting from good-behavior sentence reductions and reintegration custody; asked about the circumstances of his release, he said only: "We're not on such friendly terms [with you] that I would comment on this."

Mészáros Lőrinc

Corruption Nepotism

Lőrinc Mészáros rose from a small-town gas fitter in Felcsút to Hungary's wealthiest individual in the years following Fidesz's return to power in 2010, almost entirely through public procurement. His companies won hundreds of billions of forints worth of state-funded contracts annually, with up to 93 percent of early revenues traceable to European Union funds. The business empire expanded well beyond construction, encompassing media acquisitions that transformed formerly independent outlets into government-aligned propaganda organs. Anti-corruption investigators and EU auditors have documented the pattern as part of a broader kleptocratic system estimated to have siphoned up to €5.5 billion from European taxpayers into the Orbán inner circle.

Shabtai Michaeli

Corruption Nepotism

Georgian-Israeli businessman Shabtai Michaeli, who described himself in a 2021 interview as Antal Rogán's friend of "more than ten years," held a management position at VolDan Hungary Kft., the Hungarian subsidiary of Liechtenstein-based VolDan Investments Limited — one of the intermediary firms in Hungary's 2013–2017 residency-bond (letelepedési kötvény) scheme. According to 2023 Direkt36 reporting, some Russian citizens who purchased residency bonds through VolDan were not repaid after the bonds matured; the parent company cut off communication with clients in autumn 2022, and forced-dissolution proceedings against the Hungarian subsidiary began in November 2022. A lawyer representing the clients said at least four of nine represented clients reported combined losses of roughly €1.2 million, and that a criminal complaint against the company was being prepared. VolDan collected more than HUF 7 billion in processing fees from bond buyers overall. The matter remains contested and unresolved — no investigation outcome or court ruling on this specific case is publicly known; the claims above stand at the level of client reports and a planned criminal complaint, not a judicial finding of guilt.

Magyar Labdarúgó Szövetség (MLSZ)

Sports Grift Corruption

The Hungarian Football Federation (MLSZ), led by Sándor Csányi as president since 2010, has failed to close the accounting of a single TAO subsidy period since the 2013/14 season, according to information that came to light in August 2026 - even though the federation itself supervises TAO accounting for nearly 1,000 domestic football clubs. Responses to 24.hu's freedom-of-information requests showed that of 121.92 billion forints in approved support, roughly 106 billion forints remains unaccounted for, and MLSZ and the Sport State Secretariat gave contradictory data even on filing deadlines - in one case a seven-month discrepancy in the submission date. The federation attributed the discrepancy to 'reclassification between seasons.'

Ágoston Sámuel Mráz

Propaganda Corruption

Ágoston Sámuel Mráz is the founder of the government-aligned Nézőpont Institute, taking over its operational leadership from Boros Bánk Levente in 2026, and has also built business interests within the wider Nézőpont Group; the foundation received over 400 million forints in donations in a single year. Observer Budapest Médiafigyelő Kft., which he previously led and which the Nézőpont Group acquired in 2018, was awarded a 1.393-billion-forint, 48-month media-monitoring contract by the Prime Minister's Cabinet Office in December 2022 - a deal that could grow to 22.288 billion forints with options - with Mráz's own firm, Ceper Central European Perspectives, participating as a subcontractor. Átlátszó reported that the tender's criteria were so narrowly drawn that effectively only Observer could qualify, minimizing competition within what was nominally a public procurement process. Observer's revenue grew from 673 million forints before the 2018 acquisition to 2.1 billion forints by 2020, largely on the back of state contracts. Nézőpont has also published polling that critics say has repeatedly overstated Fidesz's real level of support.

Márton Nagy

Pro-Kremlin

A March 2023 joint investigation by VSquare.org and Direkt36, based on leaked internal IIB documents, found that in early February 2023 a draft letter was prepared naming Márton Nagy, Hungarian Minister of Economic Development, as its sender and Belgian Finance Minister Vincent Van Peteghem as its recipient. "At the beginning of February, a draft letter was prepared, which, according to leaked documents, had Márton Nagy, Hungarian Minister of Economic Development, as the sender, and the Belgian Minister of Finance, Vincent Van Peteghem, as the recipient. The letter was aimed at convincing Belgium to unfreeze the IIB's blocked account with Euroclear," arguing that Russia did not have undue influence over the bank because its ownership stake had recently been reduced to 45.44 percent. Strikingly, the reporting found the draft was commented on and corrected during editing by the IIB's Russian deputy chairman, Georgy Potapov — meaning a diplomatic letter to be sent in the Hungarian government's name was shaped by the leadership of a Russian bank facing Western sanctions. The article concludes that "the Hungarian government considers cooperation with the Russian-dominated bank extremely important, even in the face of the war," and notes that reporters sent comment requests to multiple Hungarian government representatives but received no response. The US sanctioned the IIB in April 2023, after which Hungary withdrew from the institution.

Sándor Németh

Propaganda

As leader of the Faith Church, shifted from supporting liberal forces to a de facto alliance with Fidesz, with critics arguing the price was taming ATV's critical edge and turning it into a semi-loyal channel under government pressure. Uses apocalyptic religious language against opposition coalitions, describing a potential left alliance as a "monster empire" from the Book of Daniel, contributing to moral panic. Benefits from recognised-church status and state support that investigative reports suggest were leveraged to align a once-critical TV channel with government interests.

Szilárd Németh

Propaganda

Famously demanded Soros-funded NGOs be "swept out" of Hungary and labelled them "foreign agents", preparing the ground for legislation stigmatising and constraining independent watchdogs. His rhetoric was central to the legal and communicative assault on independent civil society organisations. His statements provided direct political cover for measures designed to marginalise and defund government-critical NGOs.

Németh Zsolt

Propaganda Pro-Kremlin

Zsolt Németh, as news director of the MTVA public broadcaster, has been identified through leaked audio recordings and colleague testimony as a key enforcer of pro-government editorial policy within Hungarian public media. His tenure has coincided with the systematic transformation of MTVA into a platform that broadcasts uniformly Fidesz-aligned narratives, particularly during election campaigns when balance obligations are most critical. The news output overseen under his direction has also promoted Kremlin-friendly framings of the war in Ukraine, undermining Hungary's stated commitments to Western solidarity. Most recently, MTVA under his oversight agreed to broadcast hardline Chinese Communist Party propaganda content, deepening the broadcaster's role as a conduit for authoritarian state messaging.

Nemzeti Sportközpontok

Sports Grift Corruption

Nemzeti Sportközpontok (NSK), the state background institution that carries out stadium and sports-facility investments, has shown a repeated pattern of circumventing transparency and wasting public money across several unrelated cases. In 2018 the NSK issued two public tenders, each kept just under the 300-million-forint competitive-tender threshold, for the renovation of the Hajós Alfréd swimming pool and a training center in Tata; all eight bids received fell between 299.86 and 299.98 million forints - differing from one another by only 85,000-94,000 forints - and the winners were companies with minimal construction experience or revenue, linked through a common owner, Petra Stribli-Csíkos. In the same period, NSK repeatedly obstructed freedom-of-information requests about construction details of the 190-billion-forint Puskás Stadium, rejecting them with contradictory fee demands and procedural objections. In the state school-swimming-pool construction program, most of the planned pools were delayed by 2017, and cost overruns paid to late contractors cost the NSK at least 760 million forints above contracted amounts.

György Nógrádi

Propaganda Pro-Kremlin

Became a ubiquitous "security expert" on public and pro-government TV despite serious questions about his expertise, consistently endorsing Fidesz and echoing Russian and government narratives on migration and foreign policy. Helps the government's media strategy by providing pseudo-expert justification for fear-based messaging about migrants and war. Continues to appear without meaningful challenge in state and KESMA media, contributing to the spread of Kremlin-aligned talking points during the Ukraine war.

Katalin Novák

Corruption

Resigned after pardoning a man convicted of helping cover up child sexual abuse in a state children's home. The pardon triggered mass protests and a major crisis over the hypocrisy of the regime's "child-protection" rhetoric, which had been used to justify anti-LGBTQ legislation.

Zsolt Nyerges

Corruption

Zsolt Nyerges became lead co-owner, alongside Lajos Simicska, of the construction firm Közgép, which grew explosively after the 2010 change of government: the corporate group won more than 300 billion forints in state and EU tender money between 2010 and 2012, and in 2013 alone won nearly 432 billion forints worth of public procurement contracts, mostly road and rail construction projects, including work at the Paks nuclear plant. Viktor Orbán publicly defended the Nyerges-Simicska business partnership in parliament, and Fidesz's spokesperson issued an official statement congratulating Közgép on its successes. After the public 2015 break between Simicska and Orbán, Nyerges withdrew from view for a period; then in mid-2018, once Simicska capitulated and exited his businesses, Nyerges took over Simicska's entire remaining empire - including Közgép, Hír TV, and agricultural holdings - with sources describing him as clearly representing Viktor Orbán's interests in the takeover, a move expected to steer the previously government-critical Hír TV away from that stance. No criminal proceedings have been brought against Nyerges; his wealth was accumulated through official public procurement procedures.

Miklós Ómolnár

Propaganda

Miklós Ómolnár has served as editor-in-chief of the KESMA-owned tabloid Ripost since December 2016. According to a 2026 account by former Ripost staffer Ágnes Forgács, Ómolnár went "up to the Karmelita" - the Prime Minister's Cabinet Office - every Tuesday to coordinate, then returned to brief the newsroom with pre-assembled files containing personal data, photographs and "attack points" resembling political operations material rather than editorial background research. Forgács said a dedicated "political action group" at the outlet surveilled and documented opposition politicians, particularly during the 2022 election campaign. Hungarian courts have repeatedly ruled against Ripost for spreading falsehoods.

Áron Orbán

Corruption Nepotism

Áron Orbán, the prime minister's younger brother, runs the Multi Shoot Zrt. shooting range and firearms training business, whose 2022 revenue jumped from 119 million to 271 million forints and profit from 9.2 million to 54 million. Its customers include state and government-linked entities such as the Mátra Power Plant, the Central Transdanubian Water Directorate, MAVIR, and Atomix Kft.; the water directorate bought specialized protective clothing from it, while MVM Group subsidiaries ordered occupational-safety and security equipment. Multi Shoot Zrt. also received 9.2 million forints in EU support in 2021. Orbán Áron is also managing director of Bank Biztonság Bizalom Zrt., which in 2024 - together with Nemzetközi Testőr Biztonságszolgálati Kft., part of Lőrinc Mészáros's business empire - won a 36-month, 1.138-billion-forint contract to guard six offices of the Central Investigating Prosecutor's Office; the company also serves the Budapest-Capital Regional Court of Appeal and the Paks II nuclear plant, with roughly 1 billion forints in annual revenue.

Balázs Orbán

Pro-Kremlin

As Political Director in the Prime Minister's Cabinet Office, Balázs Orbán is one of the government's chief public spokesmen and architects of its pro-Russian energy policy. In a March 2022 interview with Portfolio.hu, barely a month after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he said reducing Hungary's dependence on Russian energy "can only happen gradually and could take decades," and that the large majority of Hungary's gas imports still came from Russia. In the same interview he named energy as the one area where pragmatic economic ties with Russia "cannot be renounced even in the medium term." In an October 2022 interview with Index he confirmed that EU sanctions did not touch Russian gas and defended the government's priority of keeping domestic energy prices low over confronting Russia. This entry documents an openly stated political position, not a criminal act — his role here is that of chief public spokesman and architect of Hungary's pro-Kremlin energy alignment, a documented policy stance rather than a corruption case.

Dávid Orbán

Corruption Nepotism

Dávid Orbán, the prime minister's nephew, became co-owner of the Murobán Kft. gravel quarry in Vámosszabadi at the end of 2021; after opening a new quarry site in early 2022, its revenue grew from 46 million to 212 million forints within a year. The surge coincided with Magyar Közút Zrt., the state road authority, imposing a 20-tonne weight restriction in November 2022 on Road 1401 between Győrzámoly and Győrújfalu, which effectively paralyzed traffic to rival quarry Lajta-Kavics Bányászati Kft. in Darnózseli - a company that previously earned 300-400 million forints annually, received no exemption from the restriction, and was forced into a 60-kilometer detour, while Orbán Dávid's quarry was unaffected by the restriction. Magyar Közút did not respond to questions about why only that road section was restricted, nor did it disclose which companies received exemption permits. Orbán Dávid also directs family stone-quarrying firms (Dolomit Kőbányászati Kft., Gánt Kő Kft.) that likewise supply state infrastructure projects. No criminal proceedings have been brought against him; the case stands as a documented example of a competitive advantage obtained through family connections.

Győző Orbán

Corruption Nepotism

Győző Orbán, the prime minister's father, built a business background as owner of Dolomit Kőbányászati Kft., a stone quarrying company in Gánt, while officially holding title to the Hatvanpuszta estate near Alcsútdoboz. Dolomit Kft.'s revenue rose from roughly 1 billion forints around 2010 to 4-5 billion forints annually since 2018, supplying stone largely for state construction projects, and the company has paid out roughly 10 billion forints in dividends to the prime minister's father over the decades. In an August 2025 interview, Győző Orbán himself said he financed the Hatvanpuszta "agricultural facility" from Dolomit Kft.'s revenue. Developments surrounding the estate are carried out by companies that have grown wealthy from public funds, including the Mészáros-family firm Fejér-B.Á.L. Zrt., the BDPST group controlled by István Tiborcz/Ráhel Orbán, and the security firm Nemzetközi Testőr Kft. No criminal proceedings have been brought against Győző Orbán; his wealth accumulation is documented through the lawful operation of officially registered companies.

Orbán Ráhel

Nepotism Corruption

Ráhel Orbán, as the daughter of Hungary's prime minister, leveraged her family position to gain substantial influence over the Hungarian Tourism Agency and state tourism policy while simultaneously building her own business interests in the sector. Her name became attached to the Budapest Influencer Trip campaign, in which more than one billion forints of public money were spent on bringing foreign social media influencers to Budapest, yet the visitors barely mentioned the city in their subsequent content. Separately, she acquired vineyard holdings in the Tokaj World Heritage region after state pre-emption rights that would have blocked private purchases were quietly removed for the properties in question. Investigative reporting stretching back to 2018 has consistently placed her within a broader pattern of the Orbán family's inner circle enriching itself through mechanisms tied to public resources and EU funds.

Viktor Orbán

Corruption Propaganda

Led the transformation of Hungary from a "free" to "partly free" regime through systematic media capture, court-packing, electoral engineering and rule-by-decree. Widely cited as the prototype of EU "illiberal democracy" and democratic backsliding. His system concentrates power around a single leader while maintaining the formal shell of democratic institutions.

Attila Paár

Sports Grift Corruption

According to Átlátszó's 2016 "Stadionláz" investigation, Attila Paár's company West Hungária Bau (WHB) took part in stadium construction projects worth 3.15 billion forints (including building the MTK stadium in a consortium with ZÁÉV), counted among the major winning firms the report described as "closely tied to the Orbán system." Paár and WHB have continued to win similarly uncontested state contracts since: in 2023, 444.hu reported that together with Lőrinc Mészáros's company Fejér B. Á. L., they would build the Hungaroring's new entrance building for 3.176 billion forints, in a procurement process that drew only one other bid besides Mészáros's - which was declared invalid.

Ilona Pálffy

Corruption

Oversaw mail-in and absentee voting systems that later analyses flagged as having unexplained "missing" ballots and systemic vulnerabilities. Her tenure at the election office coincided with an electoral framework already skewed by Fidesz-made rules designed to entrench the ruling party's advantage. Her public statements on invalid postal votes drew scrutiny to the integrity of the voting infrastructure. The questions raised during her tenure remain largely unresolved.

László Palkovics

Academic Capture Corruption

As Minister for Innovation and Technology, László Palkovics led the foundation to which the Hungarian government transferred roughly HUF 14 billion in state real estate and public funds in September 2021, with the stated purpose of building a Budapest campus for China's Fudan University; the foundation was registered on the very day Budapest's mayor moved to validate a referendum against the project. Átlátszó highlighted the irreversibility of the arrangement: under the founding charter, "the founder [...] may not withdraw or reclaim the assets given to the foundation," while the government also transferred its founder's rights to the board of curators, effectively placing the arrangement beyond the reach of any future change of government. The planned campus was never formally built after public protests, but the foundation kept operating: a September 2024 444.hu article reported that prosecutors — overturning the police's earlier refusal to investigate — found that "criminal suspicion cannot be ruled out" in the financial management of the foundation and a related entity, the Central European Education Foundation, which alone spent HUF 402 million on various services, while the Fudan Hungary Foundation paid its curators HUF 34.6 million, its supervisory board HUF 15.9 million, and its management HUF 27.7 million in a single year. Palkovics thus headed a non-transparent foundation structure built to serve a Chinese university's presence in Hungary, one whose finances prosecutors say cannot be cleared of suspected criminal conduct.

Papp Dániel

Propaganda Pro-Kremlin

Dániel Papp, as CEO of MTVA, became the face of the Hungarian public broadcaster's transformation into a government propaganda vehicle. He had previously drawn attention for manipulative editing practices, and under his leadership MTVA pursued a systematic pattern of broadcasting Kremlin-aligned narratives following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, while giving virtually no platform to the Ukrainian perspective. Media expert Gábor Polyák publicly called on the president of the Media Council to put an end to Russian propaganda in public media and to remove Papp from his position. The broadcaster he leads also signed a content agreement in 2024 with a hardline Chinese Communist Party propaganda channel, making MTVA a conduit for authoritarian messaging from multiple foreign state sources simultaneously.

András Patyi

Corruption

András Patyi's career is a textbook case of the revolving door between Hungary's public institutions. From 2013 to 2018 he was a member and then chairman of the National Election Commission (NVB), a period in which he earned the nickname 'the fine champion' after the NVB's campaign-law fines — including one involving kindergarteners — drew public criticism from Viktor Orbán in a video. The day his NVB chairmanship ended, September 4, 2018, he became a judge and immediately a panel president at the Kúria (Supreme Court) — a specially tailored law, nicknamed 'lex Patyi,' let him skip the competitive selection process and step straight into a senior judicial post, even though, as one judge quoted in the press noted, panel-president posts normally go to judges who have already proven themselves over years. On April 1, 2021, President János Áder appointed him Kúria vice-president for a six-year term, and in 2023 Parliament elected him to the Constitutional Court. In the space of a few years Patyi thus moved from election administration through the country's highest ordinary court to its constitutional court, each step backed by a government-party political decision rather than open competition.

Heinrich Pecina

Troll Farm Propaganda

In 2014, Austrian investor Heinrich Pecina bought the Hungarian newspapers Ringier and Axel Springer were forced to divest by the competition authority - including Népszabadság, Világgazdaság and Nemzeti Sport - and founded the Mediaworks publishing group. Under his leadership, Mediaworks abruptly shut down Népszabadság, then Hungary's most-read opposition-leaning daily, in 2016. Pecina went on to acquire regional papers from Funke Mediengruppe and subordinated their editorial lines entirely to publisher interests, eliminating journalistic independence. In 2017 he sold Mediaworks into Lőrinc Mészáros's business empire, and the company became the largest constituent of the pro-government KESMA media conglomerate formed in 2018. Analysts, including Visegrad Insight, have described Pecina as having served for years as an unofficial proxy for Viktor Orbán in dismantling independent Hungarian media.

Attila Péterfalvi

Corruption

Attila Péterfalvi is president of Hungary's National Authority for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (NAIH). In April 2026, NAIH under Péterfalvi declined to open an ex officio investigation after government-aligned media outlets and officials — including State Secretary Zoltán Kovács and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán himself — publicly disclosed the name, photograph and home address of a Tisza Party-linked IT worker known as "Buddha," amid unproven espionage allegations; Péterfalvi explained that "if it doesn't hurt him, we won't launch an official investigation either, because on one hand this is quite a unique case, and on the other we are very overloaded." In February 2026, NAIH likewise declined to investigate how criminal records belonging to Roma protesters from Gyöngyös reached Construction Minister János Lázár, Viktor Orbán, and government-aligned media; Péterfalvi told those affected to seek information directly from the data handler — meaning Lázár himself. Legal expert Ádám Remport, commenting on the case, said "the response suggests that the authority is avoiding taking ex officio action in the matter." Both cases are documented examples of NAIH routinely declining to use its investigative powers in cases of suspected data misuse benefiting the government.

Sándor Pintér

Corruption

Long-time interior minister repeatedly linked in investigative reporting to the organised-crime "mafia wars" of the 1990s, including being present at a mob-related assassination attempt and allegedly removing a weapon from the scene. Heads a security apparatus accused of intrusive surveillance practices, including the Pegasus spyware scandal where journalists, lawyers and government critics were reportedly targeted. Oversees police forces implicated in heavy-handed responses to protests, raising concerns about the politicisation of law enforcement.

János Pócs

Corruption

A July 2026 444.hu investigation found that the Jász Nation Association, registered at Fidesz MP János Pócs's farm in Jászapáti, received HUF 150 million in public funding, with numerous irregularities in its accounting: the organization's 2022 report claimed "we created a website where activities corresponding to the association's goals can be found" and that "we created our own logo, which can be found on the publication, the online platform, and promotional materials alike" — yet the article found no working website or online presence despite state money having been accounted for on these items. When approached by the paper, Pócs called the investigation "a Tisza-linked political settlement reminiscent of the darkest party-state times" (a reference to the opposition Tisza Party), and justified registering the organization at his farm by saying: "Because we work transparently, taking full responsibility for our activities. Perhaps it would have been better if we'd used that liberal-left trick of registering an association under a homeless person's name?" Pócs also denied that the National Cultural Fund (NKA) money had served campaign purposes, arguing the June 2026 harvest festival ("Aratónap") took place after the campaign period had ended. The matter remains contested: Pócs denies any wrongdoing, while the article found the verifiability of the organization's reported activities highly questionable.

Béla Pokol

Corruption

Béla Pokol was elected to the Constitutional Court in 2011 by Fidesz-KDNP's two-thirds parliamentary majority, after the governing party changed the nomination rules to bypass the need for cross-party consensus; among opposition parties, only Jobbik supported his candidacy in the vote, while the others rejected him and the other nominees as 'party-bound.' In June 2025, by then a retired justice, Pokol publicly proposed creating a 'Constitutional Defense Council' that could, ahead of a possible 2030 change of government, declare a 'constitutional defense situation' if a simple-majority government attempted an action normally requiring a two-thirds majority — a declaration that would suspend Parliament's operation and end the sitting government's mandate. Constitutional law scholars, including Richárd Szentpéteri Nagy, publicly called the proposal a 'constitutional coup,' while others called it 'absurd,' warning the mechanism could paralyze any future government. A lawyer for the Hungarian Association for Democratic Rule of Law dismissed it as 'completely unnecessary theorizing,' but critics said its real purpose was to cement the current, Fidesz-drafted Basic Law in place even against a future opposition election win.

Zoltán Pokorni

Cultural Capture

Long defended the controversial Turul monument where names of victims and perpetrators of wartime atrocities were mixed. It emerged his own grandfather, previously listed as a victim, had been an Arrow Cross member implicated in murders. For years resisted calls to rethink the monument's concept, contributing to the whitewashing of local fascist perpetrators before partially acknowledging the problem under heavy pressure. Represents a broader pattern of selective memory politics in Fidesz-controlled municipalities.

Péter Polt

Corruption

Re-appointed by Fidesz supermajority on extended 9-year terms; systematically fails to pursue high-level corruption and selectively lets sensitive cases die in his office. Widely described as the institutional guarantor of impunity for regime-connected corruption.

Zsófia Rácz

Nepotism

Appointed as deputy state secretary for youth at age 22, after the government changed the law to allow appointment without a university degree, signalling the primacy of political loyalty over experience. Built her career via the Fidesz-aligned Alapjogokért Központ and youth diplomacy, reinforcing the party's influence over youth structures. Her appointment was widely criticised as emblematic of the regime's nepotistic and loyalty-based staffing of key state positions.

Rákay Philip

Cultural Capture Propaganda

Philip Rákay has emerged as one of the most prominent figures in Fidesz's cultural propaganda apparatus, combining the roles of film director, media personality, and ideological content producer. His mega-budget historical films, bankrolled with billions of forints in public money, have drawn serious criticism from professional historians for significant factual distortions, including the depiction of weapons in the 1848 Petőfi film 'Most vagy soha!' that did not yet exist at the time. He is closely tied to the Megafon content promotion network, which received hundreds of millions of forints from private donors and uses sponsored posts to amplify government-aligned personalities and productions. His career represents the deliberate fusion of entertainment, national mythology, and state propaganda, with public funds serving as the mechanism for manufacturing and distributing ideologically useful content.

Zoltán Rákosfalvy

Corruption

Key player in shady Audi land deals and offshore structures connected to the Borkai scandal. Co-traveller on the infamous yacht. Owns a luxury Balaton apartment in the same building as chief prosecutor Polt, illustrating the close ties between business, politics and the prosecution.

Árpád Répássy

Nepotism

Árpád Répássy, then president of the Miskolc Regional Court, was appointed general deputy president of the National Office for the Judiciary (OBH) by President János Áder on September 30, 2019. Press coverage criticized the appointment because Répássy is a cousin of Fidesz politician Róbert Répássy, who served as a Fidesz member of parliament for more than twenty years and held a justice-ministry state secretary post. Reporting at the time described Árpád Répássy as 'one of the judges most loyal' to then-OBH president Tünde Handó, being the first to back her initiatives — including steps some members of the National Judicial Council (OBT) considered irregular. Given the timing and context, press coverage also suggested the appointment was meant to position Répássy as Handó's potential successor once her nine-year mandate expired in 2021. Some observers characterized his leadership style as 'dictatorial,' a description that fed concerns within the OBH about the appointment.

Rogán Antal

Corruption Propaganda

Antal Rogán, as head of the Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister, built and controls the state propaganda machinery through which vast sums are channeled into loyal media outlets and government-aligned communications firms. In January 2025, the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated him under the Global Magnitsky Act for involvement in significant corruption — making him the first sitting member of the Hungarian government to be subjected to such measures. His name had previously been linked to the controversial residency bond program and to government communication tenders widely regarded by investigators and journalists as vehicles for corrupt enrichment. Rogán's role within the Fidesz system is dual in nature: he simultaneously oversees the distribution of government messaging and coordinates the financial mechanisms that sustain the ruling party's media dominance.

Róbert Sasvári

Corruption

Róbert Sasvári has been a member of the National Election Commission (NVB) since 2010, initially as a Fidesz-KDNP delegate, and in October 2022 was elected chairman of the newly reconstituted body. While still an ordinary NVB member, in a case heard on election day, April 3, 2022, he personally proposed cutting a 500,000-forint fine imposed on Fidesz politician Péter Hoppál — for illegally removing an opposition campaign display — by 96%, down to 20,000 forints; meeting minutes show Sasvári initially proposed an even smaller amount, 10,000 forints, which the committee voted down. The episode only came to light after he was elected NVB chairman in October 2022. As chairman, Sasvári's NVB has repeatedly rejected opposition- and civil-society-initiated referendum questions: in 2026 it blocked a referendum initiative on direct presidential elections, ruling it amounted to a disguised constitutional amendment, and separately rejected an initiative aimed at barring Fidesz-KDNP from future elections. Under Sasvári, the NVB has thus combined leniency toward a violation by a governing-party politician with a consistent pattern of closing off referendum paths unfavorable to the government.

György Schadl

Corruption

Accused of running a kickback system selling bailiff licences and paying state secretary Völner to secure appointments. Prosecutors say he extracted nearly 1 billion forints in bribes from bailiffs seeking positions. The case reveals how the Fidesz patronage system operates at the institutional level, penetrating deep into the judicial enforcement apparatus. It stands as one of the most significant corruption prosecutions in Hungary in recent years.

Zsolt Semjén

Academic Capture

On 28 March 2017, Human Resources Minister Zoltán Balog submitted an emergency amendment to the higher education law at the initiative of KDNP leader Zsolt Semjén; parliament passed it in an expedited procedure on 4 April with 123 votes in favor. The law made it impossible for Central European University (CEU) to continue operating in Hungary, forcing it to relocate its teaching activities to Vienna. The submission document was dated and located in Budapest, even though Semjén was documented to be in Iran for nuclear negotiations at the time; the Prime Minister's Office said Semjén had actually signed the submission on 31 March, before departing, and that the document's date simply reflected the submission date rather than the signature date. A criminal complaint alleging forgery of an official document was filed regardless. In May 2017 the prosecutor's office dismissed the complaint, ruling that the document reflected the submission date rather than the signature date and that this violated no rule — closing the matter legally, though the procedural irregularity around the bill's initiation was documented by multiple outlets. The "Lex CEU" triggered international protests and an EU infringement procedure.

György Barna Senyei

Corruption

György Barna Senyei was elected by Parliament in December 2019 to head the National Office for the Judiciary, succeeding Tünde Handó, with a pledge to break from her practices. In 2021, however, he personally filed for judicial review against a final court ruling that had found Handó's rejection of judge Csaba Vasvári's promotion application unlawful and unreasoned, acting against his own reform pledge. In December 2023, at a National Judicial Council meeting, he became embroiled in a bitter public dispute with Kúria president András Zs. Varga, who accused Senyei of deeper involvement in the György Schadl corruption affair; Senyei retorted that Varga's 'dream is the complete takeover of the justice system.' The public clash exposed ongoing power struggles at the top of Hungary's judicial administration and tensions around judicial independence. No court has found either official guilty of a crime; the dispute is institutional and political in nature.

Miklós Seszták

Corruption Nepotism

In spring 2016, the EU's Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) alerted Hungarian authorities to serious financial irregularities in EU-funded projects run by three Kisvárda-based microenterprises — Várda King Invent, Great Alexander, and King Kft. OLAF found that the projects' stated goals had not been achieved and that the actual beneficiary of the funding was a company belonging to Miklós Seszták, then serving as Minister of National Development, rather than the nominally supported firms. Of the total HUF 30 million in grants, OLAF calculated that HUF 25.5 million in damage was done to the EU budget. The Hungarian prosecution service, which had opened an investigation on suspicion of budgetary fraud, discontinued the case in January 2017, meaning no criminal proceedings followed the irregularities OLAF had identified. The case is notable because a sitting minister's own company profited from EU funds intended for unrelated small businesses, and Hungarian authorities closed the matter without holding anyone accountable.

Lajos Simicska

Corruption

Longtime Orbán ally who dominated public construction and media via state contracts, representing the original model of Fidesz-linked oligarchic enrichment. His break with Orbán in 2015 cleared space for the Orbán family's own business networks and newer loyalist oligarchs like Mészáros.

György Simonka

Corruption

Prosecutors accuse former Fidesz MP György Simonka and 33 co-defendants of running a criminal organization that caused roughly HUF 1.4 billion in damages through fraud involving EU agricultural subsidies for vegetable and fruit producer groups. The first-instance trial has been underway at the Budapest Metropolitan Court since January 2020 and has been repeatedly delayed by successive changes of presiding judge, with no final verdict six years on. Although prosecutors describe Simonka as the organizer of the criminal enterprise, he is formally only the third-listed defendant. According to joint January 2026 reporting by 444 and Telex, the defendants — including Simonka himself, his wife, and a niece — collectively received HUF 442 million in non-repayable agricultural subsidies since the trial began in 2020, even while standing accused of improperly obtaining similar subsidies. Simonka was elected mayor of Pusztaottlaka in 2024. The case has not been finally adjudicated — conviction or acquittal remains an open question, and this entry documents it explicitly as a contested, pending case.

Somlai Bálint

Corruption Nepotism

Bálint Somlai emerged as a key figure in the business network surrounding the National Bank of Hungary (MNB) through his close association with Ádám Matolcsy, son of central bank governor György Matolcsy. According to state audit findings, his companies derived between 70 and 95 percent of their revenues from the central bank or from MNB-linked foundations, a level of dependence that raises fundamental questions about competitive market conduct. He secured prestige real estate and construction projects that were exempted from normal public procurement procedures, allowing contracts financed with public money to be awarded without competitive tendering. The State Audit Office investigation launched in 2025 into MNB foundation spending has implicated the broader network in which Somlai operated, with investigative reporting consistently placing him at the centre of schemes through which public funds were routed into private enrichment.

István Stumpf

Corruption

Long-time Fidesz strategist placed on the Constitutional Court solely with governing-party votes. Advocates a "strong state" model that legitimises the illiberal constitutional system, providing intellectual justification for the concentration of executive power.

János Süli

Pro-Kremlin

János Süli served as Minister without Portfolio from 2016 to 2022, responsible for the technical direction and coordination of the Paks II nuclear plant expansion, a project built under a 2014 Moscow-signed Hungarian-Russian intergovernmental agreement and led by Rosatom's subsidiary ASE. He resigned his post on 7 September 2022; a presidential decree published in the official gazette stated only that his mandate ended "in view of his resignation," and he told ATV by phone: "It wasn't the two ministers' criticism that made me resign, that criticism didn't get to me" — without disclosing the actual reason. According to hvg.hu's analysis, his departure was the second mysterious leadership change atop the project: his predecessor Attila Aszódi had been dismissed in 2019 for unexplained reasons, and the head of Hungary's nuclear safety authority resigned without explanation in April 2021. The article also documented that the Paks II project was running significantly behind its original schedule, and that Rosatom had only managed — after years of delay — to produce plan documentation the regulator could conditionally accept. Süli's tenure illustrates the pattern in which the Hungarian government built a strategic partnership with a Russian state nuclear company while the project's leadership cycled through repeated, unexplained personnel changes and serious delays.

Tamás Sulyok

Corruption Nepotism

Tamás Sulyok was elected president of the Constitutional Court by the body itself in 2016, and in February 2024 Fidesz-KDNP floor leader Máté Kocsis announced his candidacy for President of Hungary at a party retreat in Balatonalmádi, with no public consultation or competitive nomination process — a move the opposition met with a boycott and sharp criticism. Parliament elected him President on February 26, 2024, with 134 votes in favor. MSZP said that as Constitutional Court president Sulyok had 'served the Orbán government in everything,' while DK called him 'another Fidesz party soldier' — characterizations made by opposition parties, not judicial findings. It is independently verifiable that the Constitutional Court under his presidency ruled in May 2022 that referendum initiatives on the Fudan University campus in Budapest and on unemployment benefits were unconstitutional, blocking both votes. Sulyok's nomination and the Court's rulings are documented examples of party-political influence over judicial and head-of-state institutions; no court has found him guilty of any crime.

József Szájer

Corruption

Co-author of Hungary's Fundamental Law and prominent anti-LGBTQ politician who was caught fleeing a lockdown-breaking Brussels gay orgy with drugs in his possession. The scandal became a global symbol of the regime's moral hypocrisy and double standards, given his role in drafting anti-LGBTQ constitutional provisions.

Annamária Szalai

Propaganda

Former Fidesz MP personally appointed by Orbán to head the new media authority with sweeping powers. Used her position to tilt radio licences and media oversight in favour of Fidesz-aligned outlets, building one-party control of broadcast regulation from the ground up.

Vivien Szalai

Propaganda

As TV2 news director, oversees a newsroom that has become a central pillar of pro-government propaganda, regularly running smear campaigns and partisan stories under the guise of news. Appeared in the TV2 pro-Orbán campaign video and later falsely claimed no one told viewers whom to vote for; media watchdogs exposed the lie by showing the closing frame explicitly urging "Vote for Viktor Orbán". Her channel repeatedly violated election-law rules on political advertising by news anchors, resulting in fines but continuing the practice in subsequent campaigns.

Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky

Corruption Pro-Kremlin

Szalay-Bobrovniczky was appointed Minister of Defence despite holding substantial private business interests directly tied to defence-related and Russian-linked companies, raising acute conflict-of-interest concerns for a NATO member state. Using a loan from the Hungarian Development Bank, he acquired a majority stake in Czech aircraft manufacturer Aero Vodochody while simultaneously overseeing Hungarian military procurement as minister. He also maintains ownership interests in ventures connected to Transmashholding Hungary, a Russian-Hungarian railway consortium operating under a bilateral cooperation framework. His case is widely cited as an egregious failure to separate public office from private financial gain.

Miklós Szánthó

Propaganda Corruption

Lawyer Miklós Szánthó has led the government-aligned Center for Fundamental Rights since 2013 and, between 2019 and 2022, also chaired the board of trustees of KESMA, the foundation that runs Hungary's pro-Fidesz media empire. A 2021 investigation by Átlátszó found that the nonprofit company operating his center, Jogállam és Igazság Nonprofit Kft., received at least 925 million forints over just three years from the Prime Minister's Cabinet Office, funneled through the Batthyány Lajos Foundation. The arrangement obscures the origin of the public money - at least one contract required no service in return - while staff salaries at the organization rose from 790,000 to 2.07 million forints a month between 2015 and 2019. Szánthó personifies the overlap between the government-aligned think-tank network and the pro-government media empire, simultaneously heading an organization funded by disguised public money and the board that oversaw KESMA's media assets.

Századvég

Corruption Propaganda

In 2010, the year Fidesz took power, the Századvég group won no public procurement contracts at all; afterward, government orders began flowing to it continuously - reaching 2 billion forints by 2012, and totaling roughly 12 billion forints in state contracts between 2010 and 2016, mostly with the Hungarian National Bank, the Prime Minister's Office and the National Economy Ministry. Its largest single contract, a 4.8-billion-forint advisory and research commission, came from the National Economy Ministry in November 2015. According to a 2020 444 report, Századvég functions as the government's primary political background institution, producing the surveys underlying government policy decisions and signing multi-billion-forint contracts with the state every year; during a 2020 internal reorganization, board member and co-founder Gábor G. Fodor was sidelined despite formally keeping his title, while financial control passed to Gábor Fűrész, a figure linked to Árpád Habony's circle.

Vajk Szente

Cultural Capture

Szente Vajk is a leading creative figure in regime-aligned Hungarian filmmaking, whose work is characterised by ideologically tinged productions that promote simplified national narratives consistent with government messaging. As co-writer of 'Most vagy soha!', he is associated with large-budget state-funded projects that have drawn criticism for historical inaccuracies and propagandistic framing, including scenes featuring weapons that did not exist in 1848. His productions benefit from a film-funding ecosystem that structurally favours government-friendly creatives, channelling public resources toward politically palatable content. His professional advancement is closely tied to a cultural policy that redirects state financing away from independent artistic voices.

Péter Szijjártó

Corruption Pro-Kremlin

As foreign minister, Szijjártó repeatedly accepts luxury yacht trips and private jet travel provided by oligarchs who hold major state contracts, creating an evident conflict of interest between his official duties and his personal associations. In 2020 he was photographed aboard a luxury yacht in the Adriatic at the height of the Belarus crisis, while official communications implied he was working from his office. He maintains close ties with business figures who profit substantially from state and EU-funded infrastructure projects, blurring the line between public policy and private enrichment. Concurrently, his vigorous defence of Hungary's economic relationships with Russia and China raises serious strategic concerns within the country's NATO and EU obligations.

Péter Szikszai

Propaganda

Under the pseudonym "Zummer Fülöp," Péter Szikszai wrote a 2020 Magyar Nemzet article titled "The Scientific Characterization of the Organism Named Szabó Tímea," describing the opposition politician as an "organism" and a "biological weapon of a hidden power." In February 2022 the Budapest-Capital Regional Court (Fővárosi Törvényszék) issued a final ruling convicting Szikszai and Magyar Nemzet's then editor-in-chief, Tamás Toót-Holló, of defamation, sentencing both to one year of probation; the court found the piece used a dehumanizing style resembling that of the Nazi era, incompatible with respect for human dignity. The paper was ordered to delete the article, pay damages, and publish an apology. Despite the final conviction, Szikszai's career was unaffected: in January 2025 he was appointed editor-in-chief of the government-aligned channel HírTV.

Károly Szita

Corruption Nepotism

Károly Szita, Kaposvár's long-serving Fidesz mayor, was found by a 2019 Átlátszó investigation to have declared roughly ten times more income from MTVA (Hungary's public-media operator) on his official wealth declaration for 2015–2016 than MTVA's own published figures showed for him. In June 2023, Átlátszó reported that Kaposvár's city hall purchased a luxury-specification (leather-seat, four-wheel-drive) Škoda Superb official car for a net HUF 18 million (about HUF 23 million including VAT), reporting that the car "will presumably belong to Mayor Károly Szita, who currently also uses a Superb" — at a time when social-aid organizations said need was rising among the population while charitable donations were falling. During his tenure, several major municipal projects in Kaposvár, including a biomass heating plant and a transportation center, ran significantly over budget and behind schedule.

György Szöllősi

Sports Grift Propaganda

Szöllősi György moved from his role as communications director at Puskás Akadémia to become editor-in-chief of Nemzeti Sport, in the process transforming Hungary's leading sports daily into a prominent media supporter of Orbán's football project. Through his editorship he consistently normalises a funding model in which elite sport is financed primarily through state TAO subsidies and tax incentives, crowding out voices that question the scale of stadium construction spending. Critics of the sports-financing system are routinely framed as opponents of national progress, performing ideological work for the government by fusing football investment with patriotic identity. His career trajectory is a clear illustration of how political power leverages sports media to legitimise its policy narratives.

Pál Szombathy

Propaganda

Pál Szombathy served as CEO of Index.hu during the critical phase of its independence crisis, presiding over the sequence of events that culminated in the mass resignation of more than seventy journalists. The editorial staff departed after it became clear that the ownership and management structure of the outlet had been reconfigured at the expense of editorial independence. Szombathy's appointment and conduct illustrate the tactic by which interests aligned with the government dismantle independent media from within, by installing loyalists in key positions rather than through overt censorship. The Index affair is considered a landmark episode in the documented erosion of press freedom in Hungary.

Péter Takács

Corruption Nepotism

Takács Péter rose from hospital director to deputy director of the National Hospital Directorate (OKFŐ) in late 2020, then became Hungary's health state secretary in 2022. His wife, Kőszegi Éva Boglárka, knew future foreign minister Péter Szijjártó from her time as Fidelitas vice-president during his leadership of the youth organization. His brother-in-law, Kőszegi Gábor Árpád, held signing authority at SRF Silk Road Fund Holding, which on 20 April 2020 - the same day the Foreign Ministry signed a 17-billion-forint contract with Fourcardinal Kft. for 1,000 Chinese ventilators - acquired a 10% stake in Fourcardinal in exchange for seven-eighths of its profit. Fourcardinal and Silk Road Fund paid out roughly 18.2 billion forints in dividends before both were dissolved without a legal successor. No evidence has emerged that Takács or his family personally received any of the money, which he denies, stating the Silk Road Fund brought 'zero' ventilators into the country. The affair remained live in 2026 after the Foreign Ministry itself filed a criminal complaint over suspected mismanagement in the ventilator procurement, with Takács publicly defending the overpricing as a result of pandemic-era shortages.

László Tasnádi

Corruption Nepotism

László Tasnádi began his career in the intelligence services of the communist one-party state, then served from 2010 to 2016 as State Secretary for Law Enforcement under Interior Minister Sándor Pintér, described in reporting as the minister's confidant. According to a Direkt36 investigation, at the end of 2019 Tasnádi acquired a 33 percent stake in Communication Technologies Kft., the intermediary company that delivered NSO Group's Pegasus spyware to Hungary's security services in a roughly €6 million (HUF 2.5-3 billion) deal conducted without a public procurement process. Hungary's National Security Service voted to acquire the software in October 2017, bypassing procurement rules, and it was later deployed from 2018 onward against at least four journalists as well as businesspeople and lawyers. Tasnádi currently chairs the board of Civil Biztonsági Szolgálat Zrt., the private security company empire of his former superior, Sándor Pintér. The case is a documented example of a former Interior Ministry official personally profiting, after leaving office, from an opaque security-related deal connected to his own former ministry; the Pegasus affair has never resulted in accountability, and according to Radio Free Europe the government "essentially did not respond to the questions raised about it."

Tamás Terdik

Cultural Capture

As Budapest's chief of police, Tamás Terdik issued an order in June 2025 — acting in his capacity as the assembly-law authority — banning the Budapest Pride march, even though it was being co-organized by the Metropolitan Municipality and the Rainbow Mission Foundation. Unusually, police issued the ban before the city had even formally notified authorities of the gathering, prompting Mayor Gergely Karácsony to say police had 'issued a ban on a non-existent gathering — by that logic they could have banned unicorn walks.' Hungary's Kúria (Supreme Court) annulled that first ban on June 11, but police under Terdik banned the march a second time, so the event ultimately went ahead as a mass demonstration amid legal uncertainty. Terdik's police force carried out one of the first major enforcement actions under Hungary's 2025 national law restricting Pride events, an action Hungarian and international press and civil-liberties advocates alike characterized as an arbitrary restriction of the freedom of assembly.

István Tiborcz

Corruption Nepotism

Tiborcz István's name is inseparably linked to the Elios Innovatív Zrt. street-lighting scandal, in which the EU's anti-fraud office OLAF found serious irregularities and bid-rigging in public procurement procedures; Hungary repaid substantial sums to the EU budget but no domestic criminal proceedings followed. Despite his relatively young age, he has accumulated considerable wealth through state-linked property and tourism deals conducted under opaque terms and conspicuously favourable conditions. As Viktor Orbán's son-in-law, he has become the symbolic embodiment of the fusion between family and state interests, with his companies benefiting almost exclusively from opportunities facilitated by government proximity. His case is among the most thoroughly documented examples of how Hungary's oligarchic system operates, attracting sustained scrutiny from both domestic investigative media and international outlets.

András Tombor

Troll Farm Corruption

András Tombor - a former security-policy advisor to the first Orbán government and a businessman close to Árpád Habony's inner circle - acquired the Mandiner news portal on June 1, 2017, through his newly created company, Mandiner Press Kft. Just months earlier, in February 2017, an Átlátszó investigation revealed that a mysterious Luxembourg investor, Mangusta Invest SA, had taken a stake in Tombor's advertising company Atmedia; Mangusta's directors were linked to controversial international financial dealings, including an alleged Russian-Angolan debt-restructuring scheme, suggesting an opaque ownership background behind the Mandiner deal. According to a 2017 Index article, Mandiner - previously a right-leaning but sometimes government-critical blog aggregator - passed into government-aligned hands with Tombor's acquisition, and two staff members were removed from the masthead. Tombor is also the founder of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), which grew over the following years into one of the government's largest publicly-funded cadre-training institutions and media empires.

László Tóth

Corruption

László Tóth, president of the Hungarian Judo Federation, is one of the owners of TMT Technics Kft., which acted as a pandemic-era intermediary supplying medical equipment to the Hungarian state. The company bought a Chinese mask-manufacturing machine line for €226,000 and almost immediately resold it to the State Healthcare Provider Center for €600,000 - nearly triple the price - while comparable Chinese lines were available on online marketplaces for a fraction of that, around €60,000. Police declined to investigate the deal for suspected budgetary fraud, using reasoning the press described as strikingly hard to follow. Tóth's name also surfaced in connection with the ventilator procurement, his company being one of ten domestic suppliers in the roughly 17,000-unit state program. The case illustrates the broader pattern of Covid-era health procurement running through newly founded or newly repurposed intermediary firms.

László Trócsányi

Corruption

Key architect and international defender of constitutional and judicial changes criticised for weakening checks and balances. Argued the EU should stay out of "internal" Hungarian rule-of-law issues, providing intellectual cover for illiberal reforms at the European level.

TV2 Csoport

Corruption Propaganda

TV2 Csoport's official majority owner has for years been a trust company called AGBVK Zrt., which formally manages other people's assets while leaving the identity of the ultimate beneficial owner obscured. In September 2025 it emerged that Talentis Group Zrt., the flagship of Lőrinc Mészáros's business empire, had transferred roughly 28.5 billion forints - mostly in dollars, with smaller forint and euro components - to AGBVK, an amount roughly matching TV2's estimated market value. In April 2026, Mészáros's group publicly acknowledged for the first time that it owns TV2, stating in an announcement that its ownership circle had no plans to sell the channel at either market or discounted prices. Since 2015 - first under Andy Vajna, then under Lőrinc Mészáros - the channel has continuously functioned as one of Fidesz's most important propaganda tools, backed by billions of forints a year in state advertising.

V4NA

Propaganda Pro-Kremlin

V4NA was founded in late 2018, owned by Árpád Habony (40%), the KESMA-linked New Wave Media Group (57%) and Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky, then Hungary's ambassador to London (3%). The agency advertised itself as a rapid-response London newsroom with a 50-person international staff; in reality, a 2022 Átlátszó investigation found, the vast majority of its content was written in Budapest, in the Globe 3 office building in Óbuda, the company never employed more than two British staff, and its London address was a commercial mail-forwarding service used by dozens of other companies to claim a "prestigious" address. V4NA spread EU-critical, Ukraine-skeptic content across the Balkans and Visegrad countries in line with the Orbán government's positions.

Gergely Váczi

Propaganda

TV2 presenter who took part in the 2018 and 2022 pro-Fidesz videos where news staff declared their intention to vote for Orbán and encouraged viewers to follow, undermining minimal standards of editorial neutrality. Continues to front content on a channel that pushes paid and unpaid pro-government messaging, including war-scare Facebook spots branded as "Tények Extra". Serves as another example of how individual media faces lend personal credibility to partisan campaigns in an environment with weak regulatory enforcement.

Andy Vajna

Corruption Propaganda

As Viktor Orbán's government film commissioner, Andy Vajna bought the debt-laden TV2 channel in late 2015 with the help of a multi-billion-forint loan from state-owned Eximbank; within two and a half years, with Árpád Habony's involvement, it became one of Fidesz's most important propaganda outlets. Despite receiving 5 billion forints a year in state advertising plus another 4 billion forints in cable carriage fees, the channel posted a 6-billion-forint loss in 2016 and a 2-billion-forint loss in 2017. According to 2019 reporting, Vajna had already sold the channel as early as 2016: a small company from Cinkota, Businesshelp Kft., paid 7.8 billion forints as an advance in 2016 to TV2's holding company MBC, a sum that had grown to nearly 20 billion forints by 2019 - while the real buyer never officially appeared as owner. The concealed change of ownership only came to light after Vajna's death in January 2019, when Lőrinc Mészáros officially took over TV2.

András Zs. Varga

Corruption

A proven Fidesz loyalist installed as chief justice without prior experience as an ordinary judge, against the will of judicial self-governance bodies. His appointment packed the top court with regime allies for a 9-year term, further eroding judicial independence.

Judit Varga

Propaganda Corruption

Central political defender of rule-of-law backsliding, attacking EU reports as "absurd and untrue". Refused to cooperate with the Pegasus inquiry into illegal surveillance of journalists and opponents. Her ministry actively blocked transparency and accountability mechanisms.

Mihály Varga

Pro-Kremlin Corruption

Finance Minister Mihály Varga signed the February 2019 agreement establishing the Budapest headquarters of the Russian-led International Investment Bank (IIB) together with IIB president Nikolai Kosov, under which the bank was exempted from all taxes and public charges and from financial or regulatory oversight, and its staff and their families received diplomatic immunity and unrestricted entry rights. Opposition MP Zita Gurmai called the deal "Putin's Trojan horse," saying it offered "an unprecedented opportunity" for potentially risky individuals to enter EU territory without meaningful scrutiny. Direkt36's 2019 reporting noted that Varga represented Hungary at the highest level in the bank's leadership and traveled to Moscow in February 2019 to discuss Hungary joining another Russian-led financial institution. Separately, a January 2024 Átlátszó investigation found that Varga's family bought a Lake Balaton luxury property valued at HUF 169 million through a company (Gyenes Resort Kft.) created solely for that purpose: the company "had only one property and revenue equal to what the Varga family paid in rent," and after the family purchased the house in 2022 the company effectively stopped operating before entering voluntary winding-up (végelszámolás) at the end of 2023. Varga was thus simultaneously the signatory of a deal granting sweeping privileges to a Russian state bank, and the beneficiary of an opaque single-purpose corporate structure used to acquire a Lake Balaton luxury property.

Attila Várhegyi

Corruption

Attila Várhegyi received a final court conviction for embezzlement and related offences connected to a fictitious invoicing scheme operated through Mahir Szolnok Kft. during the 1990s, and was handed a suspended prison sentence. Despite this criminal conviction, he continued to function as an important party insider within Fidesz, providing an early signal that misconduct by party-linked figures would not necessarily carry political consequences. His case set a formative precedent for the culture of impunity that would deepen in subsequent decades, demonstrating that even a judicial finding of guilt need not result in exclusion from the party's inner circle. The affair remains a reference point for analysts tracing the long roots of corruption tolerance within the Fidesz political family.

Attila Vári

Corruption Nepotism

Two-time Olympic and world champion water polo player Attila Vári served as president of the Hungarian Water Polo Federation from September 2018 to October 2022; in 2019 he ran as the joint Fidesz-KDNP mayoral candidate in Pécs, and after losing became a member of the local Fidesz council faction. During his presidency, according to a transparency report commissioned by his successor Norbert Madaras, the federation spent money almost without restraint: in 2019 it bought a used Mercedes-Benz Tourismo bus for 93 million forints (219,000 euros) that was barely used and lost money on every kilometer driven, since depreciation exceeded rental income; the following leadership resold it in 2023, poorly maintained and missing seats, for less than half the original price. The federation accumulated a 487-million-forint deficit under Vári's presidency; since his resignation the Public Procurement Arbitration Board has fined the federation several million forints for irregular procurement procedures, and a criminal investigation into suspected breach of fiduciary duty from his tenure is ongoing.

János Vásárhelyi

Corruption

János Vásárhelyi ran the Kossuth Zsuzsa children's home in Bicske from 2004 to 2016, where he exploited his position of authority to sexually abuse and assault at least ten boys in his care. In September 2019 he received a final eight-year prison sentence for sexual violence and coercion - far below the 22.5 years prosecutors had sought - because the court treated his award-recognized professional record as a mitigating factor. Those awards included Budapest's Bárczy István Prize (2015) and Hungary's Bronze Cross of Merit, civilian division (2016), the latter nomination backed by then-Human Resources Minister Zoltán Balog. The Bárczy Prize was revoked in 2019 once the case became public. His deputy, Endre Kónya, who helped cover up the abuse, received a 2023 presidential pardon from Katalin Novák that triggered the scandal leading to her resignation. Vásárhelyi was conditionally released from prison in April 2026 after serving two-thirds of his sentence.

Miklós Vaszily

Propaganda

Miklós Vaszily played a central role in converting the independent Origo news portal into a pro-government mouthpiece, a transformation that triggered the departure of many of the outlet's leading journalists. He subsequently acquired influence over Index.hu through Indamedia and held senior positions at state media, TV2, and Echo TV — all key nodes in the Fidesz media empire. His career is an integral element of a broader media-capture strategy in which state advertising allocation and ownership changes are used to structurally marginalise critical journalism across the Hungarian media landscape. His trajectory illustrates how editorial appointments, corporate ownership, and access to state resources function as mutually reinforcing mechanisms in the systematic dismantling of independent press.

Gábor Végh

Sports Grift Corruption

Gábor Végh simultaneously serves as president of Hungarian top-flight club Zalaegerszegi TE (ZTE) and Slovenia's second-division NK Nafta 1903; a 2023 444.hu article called it "surprising" that the Slovenian club's president is Végh, described as close to Lőrinc Mészáros, while the Hungarian government transferred 570 million forints through the Bethlen Gábor Fund to develop the Slovenian club's academy. According to Átlátszó's 2016 "Stadionláz" investigative series, Végh's company Pharos '95 Kft. was already among the stadium-construction firms tied to the Felcsút circle, working on the renovation of several provincial stadiums (including Mezőkövesd, Balmazújváros, Békéscsaba and Zalaegerszeg), while according to the commercial register the company's address was Lőrinc Mészáros's permanent residence - meaning Végh financed the renovation of his own club ZTE's stadium through a company officially registered at an address tied to Mészáros.

Vilmos Velkovics

Propaganda Pro-Kremlin

HírTV host who uses his programme to aggressively promote the government's war-related narratives, including invoking Nazi propaganda examples in ways critics describe as whitewashing or trivialising historical crimes to justify current messaging. Contributes to the radicalisation of pro-government audiences by presenting hardline positions as common sense while demonising opposition and Western actors. Part of a cohort of talk-show hosts in Fidesz-aligned channels whose shows mix disinformation, historical relativisation and personal attacks.

Attila Vidnyánszky

Academic Capture Cultural Capture

Attila Vidnyánszky, director of Hungary's National Theatre, was elected on 31 July 2020 as chairman of the board of trustees of the foundation set up to run the University of Theatre and Film Arts (SZFE) as part of the government's 'model change' program, which moved the university from state to foundation control. According to the SZFE senate, the board pushed through founding documents that eliminated essentially every element of institutional autonomy: the university could no longer decide its own operating rules, budget or development plan, nor elect its rector or appoint department heads. The senate said this was done without the consultation the ministry had previously promised. The decision triggered mass resignations from the senate, faculty protests, and a months-long student occupation of the university building in autumn 2020. Vidnyánszky was removed as board chairman in September 2026 after a summer law change gave the education minister founder-rights control over boards at foundation-run universities; he was succeeded by film scholar András Bálint Kovács.

Eszter Vitályos

Propaganda Corruption

As Fidesz MP and government spokesperson, was promoted on large billboards by a "civil" association that received 10 million forints in state funding, effectively channelling public money into her personal brand-building. Campaigned in 2022 with grandiose infrastructure promises that investigative follow-ups found only partially or not at all fulfilled, highlighting a pattern of over-promising. Uses the government spokesman role to aggressively defend Fidesz policies while glossing over systemic misuse of public funds documented by watchdogs.

Pál Völner

Corruption

Charged in a major corruption case for allegedly taking regular bribes from the head of the bailiffs' chamber in exchange for arranging appointments and state favours. His case is one of the rare instances where the Hungarian prosecution actually pursued a Fidesz-connected official, likely because the evidence was overwhelming. He resigned his parliamentary seat and left Fidesz after the allegations became public.

László Windisch

Corruption

László Windisch served as the National Bank of Hungary's deputy governor for financial supervision and consumer protection from 2013 to 2019, then was elected president of the State Audit Office (ÁSZ) on 6 July 2022. Under his presidency, the ÁSZ ruled in February 2024 that six opposition parties — DK, Jobbik, Momentum, MSZP, LMP and Párbeszéd — had accepted a combined 261.26 million forints in prohibited support from the Mindenki Magyarországa Mozgalom during the 2022 election campaign, and ordered them to repay the sum within 15 days; the leaders of Momentum and Jobbik criticized the ruling as a politically timed tool of the government ahead of the 2024 municipal elections. In June 2026, Windisch petitioned the Budapest Metropolitan Court to remove Ferenc Biró, president of the Integrity Authority — a body created in 2023 under EU pressure to identify corruption risks and oversee the use of EU funds in Hungary — after the Central Investigating Prosecutor's Office charged Biró with abuse of office and forgery of public documents. The case is a documented example of a Fidesz-era-appointed state official using his institutional powers against the head of a separate anti-corruption oversight body.