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.