“We are not going to let Hungary become a country of immigrants!”
“The only thing that matters is the security of the Hungarians.”

These have been the governing Fidesz party’s key messages in its campaign for the upcoming parliamentary elections on April 8. While the government fiercely opposes taking in refugees and migrants, a joint investigation by 444 and Direkt36 has revealed that people who could pose serious security risks for Hungary and the European Union were granted residency through a controversial residency bond scheme run by the Hungarian government.

One of them is a Syrian man who is a key member of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s inner circle, who is on the United States’ sanction list, also was granted a residency permit in Hungary.

These revelations came after both 444 and Direkt36 received an envelope from an unknown sender more than two months ago. The envelope contained the names of citizens of various countries, who, according to the sender, had received residency permits through Hungary’s residency bond program.

The law creating the program, initiated by Antal Rogán, a powerful politician of Fidesz and now the head of cabinet of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, was rushed through Parliament without substantial debate in 2012 and quickly became one of the most controversial initiatives of the Fidesz government. Under the scheme, those who invested 250-300 thousand euros in Hungarian state bonds were granted a Hungarian residency permit. Under the program, the residency permit could also be extended to their immediate family members. With the Hungarian permit in their pocket, the investors were given freedom of movement inside the entire European Union.

The most heavily criticized aspect of the program was that foreigners did not invest in the residency government bonds directly, but did so through designated intermediary companies with opaque ownership structures. The companies were handpicked by the Economic Committee of the Parliament without any public tenders.

Between 2013 and 2017, Hungary handed out nearly 20,000 permanent residence permits for residency bond investors and their family members. While Chinese nationals were the predominate purchasers the permits, permits were also issued to hundreds of Russians and dozens of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. The Hungarian authorities, citing privacy concerns, have been resisting calls for disclosing the names of the bond buyers.

Direkt36 and 444 made various efforts to verify the data sent in the envelopes. We could identify several of the people by matching their personal details (like date of birth) with public records. We also managed to track down their connections to Hungary through their business activities or simply through social media postings.

Also, months before the arrival of the envelopes, a source provided us with names of a group of residency bond buyers. These names matched several of those sent in the envelopes. In addition to this, a source familiar with the administrative procedures that the Hungarian authorities conduct on immigrants also confirmed that several people listed in the envelopes indeed received Hungarian residency papers.

444 and Direkt36 have decided to reveal the names of buyers only in cases where the disclosure serves the public interest.

A businessman named Atiya Khoury, who  received residency permit in the Hungarian program, was put on a sanction list by the United States’ Treasury Department for assisting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime in 2016. There are clues that link him and his family members to Hungary.

It is not known when he bought the residency bonds – before the respective accusations against him or after that. Sources familiar with the Hungarian authorities’ administrative procedure said, however, that the screening of the bond buyers was superficial, in large part because of the high number of people that had to be checked.

UPDATE 23.10.2025: An earlier version of this article included the name of a Syrian citizen suspected by Italian authorities of being a member of an international money laundering criminal organization. While the article was being prepared, one of the man’s relatives told Direkt36 that he had purchased a residency bond, but this was later denied by the Syrian citizen himself and by the Hungarian immigration authorities. Therefore, we have removed his name and details about him from the article.

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The moneyman of Bashar al-Assad

“From expanding its weapons of mass destruction program to inflicting horrific violence upon the Syrian people, the Assad regime relentlessly engages in destabilizing behaviour. Treasury will continue to act against those responsible for fuelling the Assad regime’s repressive actions and dangerous weapons proliferation,”

– begins the announcement made by Adam J. Szubin, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence of the U.S. Department of Treasury, on July 21, 2016.

That day, the United States imposed sanctions against seven companies and eight individuals, whose assets in the US were frozen and with whom US companies and nationals were prohibited to do business.

The list of sanctioned people announced in the summer of 2016 includes a Syrian citizen named Atiya Khoury. He is one of the most important moneymen of the Assad regime and responsible for human rights violations, according to the US. We found Khoury’s name when we cross-checked the names sent to us in the envelope with the publicly available US sanction database.

According to the sanction documents, Atiya Khoury owns and operates Moneta Transfer & Exchange, a financial services network that deals with currency exchange and cash transfers similar to Western Union and other companies. Due to the Syrian civil war and the accompanying violent conflict, the Assad regime has become more and more financially isolated. Thus, the network operated by Khoury has played an important role in maintaining the regime. According to the US, the Syrian government paid for fuel through this network and Khoury received a commission after each transaction. Atiya Khoury is also reported to have cooperated with a Syrian businessman named Mudalal Khuri. Khuri was also included on the US sanction list in 2015 because he was helping Syrian government forces to buy oil from ISIS. Reuters wrote that such oil sales helped ISIS become the world’s wealthiest terrorist organization.

The sanction documents also indicate that Atiya Khoury moves cash between Syria, Lebanon and Russia following the instructions of the president of the Syrian Central Bank.

Khoury also helps Assad’s family as he takes part in the management of the business empire of Rami Makhlouf. The billionaire nephew of Bashar al-Assad, Makhlouf is the richest Syrian and head of the state-owned telecom company Syriatel. According to the US, Khoury coordinates the finances of the Makhlouf family and is also involved in the management of their companies.

In the residency bond program, not only the investors, but also their close family members can apply for residence permit, and many people chose this option. Among the names sent to 444 and Direkt36, Khoury’s 14-year-old daughter and his 18-year-old son were also included as family members.

Khoury’s 18-year-old son is active on Facebook, Youtube and Instagram, regularly posts pictures about his life, including skiing in Switzerland, diving in Thailand, and driving around in sports cars in the United Arab Emirates. This January, a photo appeared on the young man’s Instagram, which was taken near the basilica in Esztergom, Hungary.

We contacted Khoury via multiple channels before publishing this article, but we did not receive any response.

There was no chance for serious security screenings

The application procedures were carried out in “a satisfactory manner in terms of security,” said Zsuzsanna Végh, director-general of the Office of Immigration and Nationality, during the March meeting of the Defense and Law Enforcement Committee of the Parliament. According to Végh, only twenty potential investors and 44 family members have been rejected by Hungarian authorities on the ground of security concerns.

According to information provided earlier by the Ministry of the Interior, potential bond investors went through a security screening carried out by four authorities: the Office of Immigration and Nationality, the Counter Terrorism Centre, the Constitution Protection Office and the police. We contacted these authorities before the publication of the article. We wanted to know what protocol these institutions followed for the security screenings, and whether they continue to think Khoury does not pose security risks. The organizations replied that they cannot provide information about individual cases.

Two sources talked about the shortcomings of the security screenings.

One of them knows the operations of VolDan, a company which was authorised to sell bonds to Russian citizens. The source said that within the company, the security screening was treated as a formality, an unpleasant, but automatic part of a bureaucratic system. It was not a question whether an applicant will or will not pass the security screening, the only question was when he would do so.

Our other informant knew the process from the state authorities’ side. The source said that the authorities normally just run the names of applicants against international wanted lists and similar automatized databases. There were no real investigations and there could not have been any because of the vast number of participants in Hungary’s residency bond program. This is how he described the situation:

“The real risk is not posed by those people who are on international wanted lists, because they would not apply for the residency bond program, and they would also be very easy to spot. The task would be to carry out a thorough screening of each individual, to have people working at the embassy of their country of origin that map out the investor’s network, look into the origin of their money, as this is the only way to see whether the applicant poses a security risk to Hungary or to the European Union. As a vast number of people bought residency bonds in the program, there was not even a chance for such a real investigation.”

At the beginning of the week, we contacted Antal Rogán, the initiator of Hungary’s residency bond program who currently leads the cabinet office of the prime minister. We wanted to know whether he was worried by the fact that through the bond programme individuals posing national security risks could come to Hungary and to the European Union, but he did not answer our questions.

For the Hungarian company data we used the services of Opten.
Cover photo: Bence Kiss, 444.hu