Private equity funds in Hungary got more money than the Budapest Airport deal
More than HUF 1,300 billion (EUR 3.3 billion) in Hungarian public funds – roughly 3% of the annual state budget – has flowed into private equity funds over recent years, according to a comprehensive new study by Transparency International Hungary (TIH).
Private equity funds doing fine in Hungary
The sum exceeds the roughly HUF 1,200 billion the state paid to buy back Budapest’s Liszt Ferenc International Airport, underlining the sheer scale of public money channelled into largely opaque financial structures.
The research, authored by TIH policy director Judit Zeisler, paints the most detailed picture yet of how Hungary’s private equity funds operate. Its central conclusion is stark: while private equity is a legitimate and widely used tool in market economies, in Hungary it has been “turned inside out”, functioning in a way that shields ownership, obscures decision-making and weakens accountability.
But they do not operate like normal equity funds
At a conference held on 9 December, International Anti-Corruption Day, investment expert Viktor Zsiday stressed that private equity funds are normally designed to pool capital – including public money – so that investors can undertake projects they could not finance alone.
Businessman and Corvinus University professor László Reszegi added that such funds would have been a major help to Hungarian entrepreneurs around the time of the post-communist transition.
Both experts, however, agreed that Hungary’s current system is deeply flawed. Zsiday went as far as to describe Hungarian private equity funds as “legalised offshore structures”. The government rejects this characterisation, insisting that the funds are tightly supervised and that public money invested in them has not disappeared. The problem, critics argue, is that there is no way to independently verify these claims because the funds are, by design, non-transparent.
No public info about who owns these private equity funds
According to TIH, 194 private equity funds were operating in Hungary at the end of 2024, managed by 60 fund managers. While the minimum capital requirement to set up a fund is HUF 250 million, little is publicly known about who ultimately owns them.
This secrecy clashes with both Hungary’s constitution – which bans state bodies from contracting with entities of unknown ownership – and EU anti-money laundering rules. Brussels has therefore launched an infringement procedure against Hungary, prompting the government to promise disclosure of beneficial owners, but only from July 2026, after the next parliamentary election.
Most of the managers are government-close figures
Despite complex ownership chains, TIH managed to identify natural persons behind 46 of the 60 fund managers, mostly figures close to the government. Among them are billionaire Lőrinc Mészáros and István Tiborcz, the prime minister’s son-in-law.
Five state-backed institutions, including the Hungarian Development Bank (MFB) and Eximbank, were found to have invested public money in 51 of the 194 funds. These investments account for the full HUF 1,311 billion in public assets identified by the study.
The largest single beneficiaries are funds managed by Tiborcz’s Gránit Asset Management, which received HUF 146 billion. Funds linked to Mészáros obtained close to HUF 100 billion, while those managed by property tycoon Dániel Jellinek’s Indotek Group received HUF 84 billion.
The funds now own stakes in more than 1,300 Hungarian and foreign companies across a wide range of sectors, including defence. Many acquisitions were completed without competition authority scrutiny, raising concerns about the creation of monopolies.
Despite the opaque ownership, 83 companies with private equity fund backing won public procurement contracts between 2021 and 2024, together securing HUF 2,603 billion in public tenders. One firm alone, B+N Referencia – responsible for hospital cleaning services – received nearly HUF 1,000 billion.
Transparency problems extend to basic reporting obligations. Around half of fund managers have failed to publish the value of the assets they manage, despite legal requirements. TIH was eventually able to obtain data on 142 funds, showing combined assets of around HUF 3,100 billion, close to 4% of GDP. Reszegi described it as “borderline farce” that even the central bank had to warn its own asset manager to comply with disclosure rules.
This holds huge risks
Beyond the risk to public finances, experts warn of broader economic damage. Reszegi argues that the dominance of government-linked firms in public tenders discourages genuinely competitive companies from even trying, weakening the private sector as a whole. Zsiday illustrated the point with a case where a state-subsidised hotel undercut a privately run competitor, driving it out of business.
In theory, investments in private equity funds can eventually return money – and profits – to the state. In practice, critics say, the lack of transparency makes it easy for funds to underperform, lose money or quietly funnel public assets away, with little chance of accountability.
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