The government will tighten and clarify the rules for identifying the ultimate beneficial owners of closed-ended investment funds — including private equity and venture capital funds — the Justice Minister said in a Facebook post on Tuesday. In the past, it took the press months—sometimes years—of painstaking work to establish who might really be behind private-equity funds worth hundreds of billions, or even trillions of forints. And even then, such reports were couched in cautious, conditional terms: nobody dared state anything as fact.
Ministers want the real owners and their true wealth
Márta Görög wrote that private equity and venture capital funds had frequently been used in recent years to conceal from public view the true, ultimate owners of substantial assets. “It is in the public interest to know who stands behind these funds,” she said.
In a video shared with the post, the Justice Minister said the objective was to make ownership structures more transparent, with particular attention paid to arrangements capable of obscuring either the identity of the ultimate beneficial owner or the nature of the ownership chain itself.
What is a private equity fund for?
Private equity funds can appeal to wealthy businessmen because they allow substantial assets to be separated and invested without it being clear to the public, sometimes for years, who is behind the fund — or, at least, without any news organisation being able to state under threat of criminal liability what may be strongly suspected.
Private individuals, companies and institutional investors can all place money in such funds. The fund manager may then invest the capital in businesses, property or other assets.
In Hungary, the fact that the identity of private equity funds’ beneficial owners was long unavailable to the public became particularly significant. Funds could often be linked to particular businessmen only indirectly — by piecing together connections between fund managers, companies, ownership structures and, in some cases, registered addresses.
NER-linked fortunes dominated
This does not in itself mean that every asset placed in a private equity fund is illegal or derived from tax avoidance. Yet the structure became particularly important under Viktor Orbán because both state and private money entered the same investment world.
Using figures from late 2023, the Hungarian business outlet G7 estimated that assets held in Hungarian private equity funds totalled roughly HUF 2.6 trillion. It calculated that about 95 per cent could be linked to businessmen close to the National Cooperation System, or NER — the political and economic network associated with Mr Orbán’s rule.
G7 estimated that approximately HUF 716 billion in fund assets could be connected to Lőrinc Mészáros, HUF 589 billion to Dániel Jellinek, HUF 323 billion to István Száraz, and HUF 207 billion to István Tiborcz, Mr Orbán’s son-in-law. It stressed, however, that these were not proven personal fortunes but calculations based on business and ownership links.
Private equity funds therefore became an important component of the Orbán system’s economic structure, not least because the state itself invested substantial sums through such vehicles.
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Transparency International said the Hungarian state had placed at least HUF 1.311 trillion in private equity funds by the end of 2025, while businesses connected to those funds won roughly HUF 2.6 trillion in state contracts between 2021 and 2024.
For years, Hungarian journalists have attempted to establish who the ultimate owners of these multi-trillion-forint fortunes might be. Direkt36, G7, Telex, Válasz Online and 24.hu have, among others, cross-referenced company databases, financial accounts, links between fund managers and official state documents.
Richer than first thought
Direkt36, for instance, analysed state data from which it was possible to infer the identities of several people behind the funds. However, the information was removed from the state database after the outlet’s article was published.
Válasz Online likewise used financial filings and ownership connections to reconstruct the scale of the wealth linked to figures such as Mr Tiborcz. It concluded that the Prime Minister’s son-in-law was far richer than he initially appeared.
That Sisyphean task — fraught with uncertainty and risk — may now become easier as a result of the Tisza government’s proposed transparency reforms.
Private equity funds in Hungary got more money than the Budapest Airport deal
