EU taxpayers may have supported 13 leading oligarchs of Orbán regime with up to EUR 5.5 billion

According to the latest study of the Budapest-based Corruption Research Center, between 2011 and 2023, EU citizens supported Orbán's “kleptocracy” with approximately EUR 3.2-5.5 billion, or HUF 1,280-2,200 billion at today's exchange rate.

For the analysis, the center's researchers analyzed data collected from 340,000 public procurement contracts identified as involving 13 key economic figures of the Orbán regime. The list includes well-known names such as Lőrinc Mészáros, (the PM's childhood friend) István Tiborcz (the PM's son-in-law) and István Garancsi, as well as names that have already fallen out of favor with NER, such as István Simicska and Zsolt Homlok, and businessmen specializing in certain areas, such as Gyula Balásy and Tibor Kuna from the advertising market and András Paár from the construction industry.

According to the center's analysis, the 13 identified actors received a total of €19.3 billion (HUF 7,723 billion at today's exchange rate) in EU subsidies through public procurement contracts between 2011 and 2023, and they arrived at the final amount being between EUR 3.2 and 5.5 billion by calculating with a “kleptocratic rent ratio” of 20-40 percent. The EUR 19.3 billion also includes tenders that were awarded to the actors when they were the sole participants in a tender, i.e. there was not even any semblance of competition. In tenders where there was some form of competition, the 13 prominent players won a total of 1,312 EU-funded public contracts worth €12.2 billion during the period under review, which accounts for 14 percent of total EU grant funding. By comparison, between 2005 and 2011, these same players won a total of €451 million in tenders, meaning that

the share of EU funds obtained by the 13 economic players examined increased tenfold after Orbán came to power in 2010.

The study notes that this is a fairly conservative estimate of how much EU funding may have ended up in business circles linked to the Orbán regime, because the research only analyzed EU funds allocated through public procurement processes, while funds won through other tenders are not included. The funding for fourty-nine percent of the tenders won by the 13 businessmen examined came from EU taxpayers' money. In public tenders financed by the Hungarian state, the ratio of kleptocratic rent, i.e. what is skimmed off by the winners of tenders through overpricing, is even higher than in the case of EU tenders. This being around 7.6-13 percent means that while EU citizens financed the establishment and consolidation of “Viktor Orbán's kleptocracy” at a ratio of 1:3, Hungarian taxpayers financed it at a ratio of 2:3 between 2011 and 2023. (CRCB, Hvg.hu)