László Palkovics

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.