In mid-April, significant events took place in the criminal trial—which has been ongoing for years at the Székesfehérvár Regional Court—regarding the alleged embezzlement case at the Ministry of Agriculture.

At the hearing held on April 14, the judge announced that the prosecution had filed an amended indictment, changing the charges against one of the key figures in the case, Kristóf Nobilis, a major businessman with political connections.

He had previously been charged with budget fraud, but under the amendment, Nobilis is now charged with money laundering.

The criminal case, which Direkt36 has been following for years, involves the prosecution’s allegation that a subsidiary of the Ministry of Agriculture—which was about to be dissolved—paid 2.2 billion forints (about EUR 6 million) in 2019 to two law firms — KPZ Law Firm and Őszy Law Firm — which, according to the indictment, did not perform any substantive work in exchange for the money.

According to the indictment, the law firms that received the money transferred significant sums to a Swiss bank account through a Budapest-based company called Astonish Zrt. Based on documents presented at one of the hearings, this account was owned by a Panamanian offshore company, Robson Holding & Finance Corp., which is linked to Kristóf Nobilis.

The previous charge against Nobilis was fiscal fraud committed on a commercial scale that caused particularly significant financial loss, because he failed to pay taxes on the funds he received. According to the Criminal Code, the penalty for this offense is imprisonment for a term of five to ten years. Under the Criminal Code, this corresponds to the penalty for the new charge—namely, money laundering involving a particularly significant amount.

However, according to a criminal defense attorney interviewed by Direkt36 who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case, there is a fundamental difference between the two legal categories: budget fraud and money laundering.

“Money laundering poses a far greater threat to society than tax fraud. In money laundering, the perpetrator is aware that the assets are derived from some form of criminal activity. Tax fraud, on the other hand, can simply involve someone failing to pay their taxes,”

– the lawyer explained, highlighting the difference.

According to a document obtained by Direkt36, the Fejér County Chief Prosecutor’s Office notified the Székesfehérvár Regional Court of the amendment to the indictment in a document dated April 2—that is, one prepared before the elections. In it, the prosecutor’s office explained in detail why it is charging Kristóf Nobilis with money laundering. The most important assertion in the document is that, according to the indictment, Nobilis was aware of the origin of the funds received by the account of the Panama-based company linked to him—that is, he knew the funds came from contracts worth HUF hundreds of millions between the ministry and law firms, which prosecutors allege constituted embezzlement—and therefore did not report them on his tax return.

Based on the document, the authorities continued to trace the money’s path and also determined that between April 2019 and April 2021, Nobilis had transferred a total of more than 1.7 billion forints (about EUR 4,7 million) to himself from the Robson account in Panama to his own private account in Switzerland. According to prosecutors, Nobilis’s goal in doing so was “to conceal the criminal origin of the funds.”

In addition to charging Nobilis with money laundering involving a particularly large sum, the prosecutor’s office is also seeking the freezing of his assets up to the amount that landed in his account—that is, more than 1.7 billion forints (about EUR 4,7 million).

Nobilis has long been a prominent figure in Hungarian business life; he has worked in the financial sector and has also made investments in the real estate market and the agricultural sector. He has also had business ties with figures who are or were close to Fidesz, such as banker Zoltán Spéder and historian Mária Schmidt, who maintains a personal relationship with Viktor Orbán.

Another key figure in the court case is Márton Nobilis, the son of Kristóf Nobilis, who served as the Minister of Agriculture’s chief of staff at the time of the 2019 financial transactions and then as State Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture until the end of 2024. During the trial, it also came to light that Nobilis Jr. maintained a good relationship with one of the attorneys charged in the case, an associate at the Őszy Law Firm.

The court appears to be interested in exactly what role the former state secretary played in the case. He was summoned to court as a witness in December 2024, but he invoked his right to refuse to testify, citing his family relationship with the defendant, and refused to testify.

We sent questions regarding the amended charges to Kristóf Nobilis and his son, Márton Nobilis. In his response, Kristóf Nobilis stated that neither he nor any member of his family had ever committed any crime. Márton Nobilis did not respond to our inquiry.

We also contacted the prosecutor’s office, but received no response from them; thus, they did not answer the question of whether the amendment to the charges in early April had anything to do with the election that took place shortly thereafter.

The money trail

Direkt36 also obtained another official document in which the prosecutor details to the court the evidence on which the charge was amended to money laundering. In it, the prosecutor cites several testimonies as well as information found on the seized electronic devices. The prosecutor also mentions “documents obtained from Swiss authorities” that pertain to the correspondence between Nobilis and his account-holding bank.

As we reported in a previous article based on a document from the prosecutor’s office, Nobilis notified the Swiss bank in 2019 that two payments of two million euros each would be deposited into Robson’s account.

According to the document, the authorities also gathered information on how the defendants communicated with one another. They conclude that Nobilis and the head of one of the law firms were already in contact during the preparation of the legal service agreements, and “while preparing the legal service agreements that facilitated the embezzlement, they agreed on the transfer of the resulting funds” to the Swiss bank account of an offshore company linked to Nobilis.

Just a loan

In an earlier statement—when he was defending against charges of budget fraud—Kristóf Nobilis explained the large-scale financial transactions by saying that these were, in fact, partial repayments of an old loan.

According to Nobilis, his Panamanian company granted an EUR 30-million loan to a company called Astonish back in the late 2000s. When the KPZ Law Firm and the Őszy Law Firm acquired this company years later, they began repaying the loan to Nobilis’s Panamanian company. Nobilis argued that the repayment of the loan was tax-exempt, so he did not have to pay any taxes on the transaction.

Nobilis had previously stated in court that he had established at least twenty offshore companies in the past, some of which he still owns today. He explained that this was standard practice in the 1990s, which he described as “unusual, but not illegal.”