Inside the secrets of the Orbán family’s businesses

2021. May 5.

The Businesses of Orbán's Family

Viktor Orbán claims that he does not have any savings, but his family members have earned millions of euros in recent years, partly from public money from the Hungarian state and the European Union. We explain how we investigated the businesses of Orbán’s family in an animated video.

Four years ago we published our first story on how the family of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is benefiting from state projects. Now we are sharing what we have found out – and how we found it out – since then in this video:

Viktor Orbán has been in power for more than ten years, but he claims that during this time he has not become a wealthy man: according to his latest asset declaration, he does not even have any savings.

His family members, meanwhile, have earned billions of Hungarian forints (millions of euros). The source of their wealth – at least, partly – is public money, as Direkt36 revealed and proved.

The main conclusions of our 4-year-long investigation:

  • How we followed trucks leaving from the mine of Orbán’s father
  • How we found the first evidence that proves that the companies of the Orbán family supply building materials for large infrastructure projects, financed by the Hungarian state and the European Union
  • How we obtained and processed nearly hundred thousand pages of projects documents, after a several years of FOIA lawsuit
  • How we discovered that public money is flowing to Orbán’s family through Hungary’s new tycoon
  • And how we confronted Viktor Orbán in Brussels and his father at his mine with our findings

The animation and graphics of the video were done by Artúr Andrási, and the studio recording was made by the Speak Easy Project.

  • Blanka Zöldi

  • András Pethő

    András is a co-founder, editor and executive director of Direkt36. Previously, he was a senior editor for leading Hungarian news site Origo before it had been transformed into the government’s propaganda outlet. He also worked for the BBC World Service in London and was a reporter at the investigative unit of The Washington Post. He has contributed to several international reporting projects, including The Panama Papers. He twice won the Soma Prize, the prestigious annual award dedicated to investigative journalism in Hungary. He was a World Press Institute fellow in 2008, a Humphrey fellow at the University of Maryland in 2012/13, and a Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 2019/20. András has taught journalism courses at Hungarian universities.