The State Audit Office of Hungary (\u00c1SZ) has identified serious irregularities and decisions causing serious losses in relation to the management of the Hungarian National Bank’s (MNB) foundation assets worth hundreds of billions of forints, according to a draft report of\u00a0 \u00c1SZ obtained by Direkt36.<\/p>\n
\u00c1SZ investigated the economic activities of the Pallas Ath\u00e9n\u00e9 Domus Meriti Foundation, established during Gy\u00f6rgy Matolcsy’s presidency of the MNB and headed by people close to him, and the company Optima Befektet\u00e9si Ltd., which managed the assets of the organization. The company held nearly HUF 500 billion in assets (about 1.25 billion EUR at the current exchange rate), a large part of which came from public funds, but \u00c1SZ found that it invested through a “structure that was essentially intransparent and made it almost impossible to assess the real value of the assets”.<\/p>\n
According to the draft report, this huge amount of money was badly invested, which has already led to a significant reduction in some of the assets. Meanwhile, companies linked to the circle of the son of Gy\u00f6rgy Matolcsy, the recently outgoing central bank governor, have benefited from the money.<\/p>\n
Here are the main findings of \u00c1SZ:<\/p>\n
The document in Direkt36’s possession is a draft report, based on an extensive investigation, which was shared with relevant actors to respond to the findings of the auditors. \u00c1SZ did not respond to our questions about the content of the draft, saying only that “comments from those involved in the investigation are being dealt with, and \u00c1SZ will publish the reports on the audits within days.”<\/p>\n
The MNB, which has been headed by former finance minister Mih\u00e1ly Varga since the beginning of March, said that “following the new leadership of the central bank, a new board of trustees has been appointed to head the Pallas Ath\u00e9n\u00e9 Domus Meriti Foundation” and a new CEO has been appointed to Optima Befektet\u00e9si Ltd. According to the MNB, an important task for the new management is to “conduct an investigation covering all legal possibilities and areas to investigate the operations of the Foundation and Optima Ltd.<\/p>\n
Following the publication of the article, the Neumann J\u00e1nos University Foundation stated that, contrary to \u00c1SZ’s findings, “there is no damage, no irregularities have occurred”. They added that it was not true that the bond deal with Optima would not be fulfilled. “Constructive negotiations are ongoing between the parties regarding the repurchase, and an agreement is expected as a result,” the foundation wrote.<\/p>\n
We contacted the other key figures listed in the draft report \u2014 including Gy\u00f6rgy Matolcsy and several former members of the Board of Trustees \u2014 but received no response. Gy\u00f6rgy Matolcsy’s son, \u00c1d\u00e1m, said in response to our questions that “I would like to inform you that I have no personal knowledge of the contents of the \u00c1SZ investigation, and I only learned about it from the press.” He added that “I am not a party to the investigation, so I am not in a position to comment on the substance of the matter, and it would not be my job to do so.”<\/p>\n
According to Mikl\u00f3s Ligeti, the legal director of Transparency International Hungary, \u00c1SZ should have launched an investigation not now, but in 2016 at the latest. “On the 8th of April 2016, the Constitutional Court ruled that the assets of the MNB foundations are public money and that they perform a public function. This means that their management should have been investigated by the public authorities from that time at the latest, but they have not done so,” Ligeti said.<\/p>\n
According to Ligeti, anyone who used MNB money for purposes other than those required by law committed embezzlement or misappropriation. And anyone who knew about it \u2014 for example, other state entities that could control the use of the money \u2014 was an accomplice. “Whether that conspiratorial conduct is criminal, misconduct in office, or culpable misconduct, or perhaps just dereliction of duty, the last of those certainly stands, but that would have to be the subject of separate investigations.”<\/p>\n
In 2014, the Hungarian National Bank established six foundations under the name of Pallas Ath\u00e9n\u00e9 Foundations, to which it made available a total of HUF 266.4 billion (nearly 670 million EUR at the current exchange rate). The officially announced objectives at the time were, among others, to support education, science, and the training of economic and financial professionals. In 2019, the foundations have essentially been merged into one foundation, the Pallas Ath\u00e9n\u00e9 Domus Meritis (PADME).<\/p>\n
The board of trustees of the foundation included several people close to Gy\u00f6rgy Matolcsy. One of these was Norbert Csizmadia, who worked with Matolcsy in the Ministry of National Economy after 2010, but their acquaintance goes back even further. Csizmadia had already worked on a study with the future central bank governor in 2007. Another member of the foundation’s board of trustees was Imre R\u00e9fy, who was deputy mayor of the village of Balatonakarattya, led by Gy\u00f6rgy Matolcsy’s ex-wife.<\/p>\n
A separate company was already set up in 2015 to manage the foundation’s assets. Under normal market conditions, the purpose of such a structure is to have a professional company manage the assets, support the preparation of investment decisions, operate and develop the foundation’s buildings. That asset management company was Optima Befektet\u00e9si Ltd. (formerly Pallas Ath\u00e9n\u00e9 Domus Optima), which, according to \u00c1SZ’s draft report, had access to funds from two other sources in addition to the central bank’s foundational assets.<\/p>\n
One was the MBH Bank, partly owned by the Hungarian state, from which it obtained a loan worth 170 million EUR (nearly HUF 70 billion at the current exchange rate), and the other was the Foundation for the Neumann J\u00e1nos University of Kecskem\u00e9t (NJE Foundation), which was established by the Hungarian state in 2020. This foundation exercises the ownership and maintenance rights of the Neumann J\u00e1nos University of Kecskem\u00e9t. The NJE Foundation bought bonds worth HUF 127.5 billion (about 320 million EUR at the current exchange rate) from Optima, essentially giving the company a loan.<\/p>\n
According to \u00c1SZ, Optima had assets worth nearly 500 billion HUF (about 1.25 billion EUR at the current exchange rate), a significant part of which, more than 400 billion HUF (about 1 billion EUR at the current exchange rate), was public money. It is not clear from the draft report what the source of the rest of the amount was, but from the available data, it seems likely that the auditors were referring to a loan from the partly state-owned MBH bank.<\/p>\n
Optima, which manages the foundation’s assets, used a large part of this huge sum to acquire stakes in two foreign real estate investment companies. According to the draft report, at the end of 2023, the Optima group owned 62.61% of the shares in the Polish company GTC S.A. and 33% and 25% of the shares in Ultima Capital S.A., a Swiss company. To achieve this, according to \u00c1SZ, Optima also used external funding. “In addition to the endowment, the OPTIMA Group financed the foreign investments with debt, thereby substantially increasing their risk.”<\/p>\n
V\u00e1lasz Online reported<\/a> that GTC paid out a total of 42 billion HUF in EUR (105 million EUR at the current exchange rate) by 2024 for properties managed by Quartz Fund Management, a subsidiary of Istv\u00e1n Sz\u00e1raz, a friend of Gy\u00f6rgy Matolcsy’s son, \u00c1d\u00e1m Matolcsy. The properties include an office building in Debrecen and a design hotel in Budapest’s 1st district. According to the article, these real estate deals have in many cases generated billions in profits for the funds managed by Quartz.<\/p>\n Swiss-based Ultima Capital S.A. was reported<\/a> by Telex in January 2025 as a company involved in the operation and development of luxury real estate in Europe, among other things. It is not doing so very successfully, since in 2022 and 2023 Ultima was loss-making, and in the first half of 2024 these losses increased. On its website, Ultima lists its Swiss, French, and Greek properties, including a villa with a pool in Corfu, a property with a private cinema in the Swiss Alps, and a French ski hotel, all illustrated with plenty of pictures.<\/p>\n The decision to buy the GTC was taken by the members of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees in 2020, according to \u00c1SZ, on the basis of an inadequate pre-decision document with glaring professional errors in less than 5 hours. This was all the time the chairman gave the members of the Board of Trustees to send in their votes. The auditors added that the pre-decision document had indicated the return on this investment, but that the calculation had not been backed up by any supporting material.<\/p>\n \u201eHowever, the calculation of the returns presented at \u00c1SZ’s request was found to be economically unreasonable, and therefore the preparatory material \u2014 and therefore the decision taken \u2014 was not sufficiently well founded,” the draft report states.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n One of Optima’s private equity funds, set up just two weeks earlier, also participated in the purchase. \u00c1SZ drew particular attention to this: according to the draft report, this “raises the possibility, in the knowledge of the rules applicable to private equity funds, that the purpose of its creation may have been to hide the investment from public interest.”<\/p>\n According to the draft report, the Optima Group paid 31 percent, nearly 60 billion HUF (about 150 million EUR at the current exchange rate), more for the stake than its stock market value. \u00c1SZ said this was an unjustified premium. After the purchase, the share price fell further, according to \u00c1SZ, and by the end of 2024 the value of the package had fallen by more than 160 billion HUF (400 million EUR at the current exchange rate).<\/p>\n Another major foreign investment of the Optima group, Ultima Capital, also made significant losses, the company’s share price falling 20% by December 2024. According to \u00c1SZ, this investment was questionable from the beginning, as it is risky to invest such assets only in the real estate market. Moreover, the Optima group had promised some minority shareholders of Ultima that it would buy shares from them. In doing so, it committed CHF 250 million (currently around 104 billion HUF) for the years 2024 and 2025.<\/p>\n After the investments criticized by \u00c1SZ, the foundation, which was stuffed with hundreds of billions of HUF of taxpayers’ money, was in trouble. The draft report quotes a letter written by the supervisory board of the foundation in January 2025 to the then president of the Hungarian National Bank, Gy\u00f6rgy Matolcsy: “The operation and solvency of the foundation is in immediate danger.”<\/p>\n Matolcsy also reports significant financial difficulties in a quoted letter sent to the President of \u00c1SZ:<\/p>\n “In view of the revenue and resource possibilities and the level of liabilities, it appears that without external assistance, there is no possibility at this stage to find a satisfactory solution to the current situation of the PADME\/Optima group.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n According to \u00c1SZ, the audit of PADME’s management found that the Foundation’s reports do not give a true and fair view of the overall management of the organization. \u00c1SZ also pointed this out to the Ministry of Finance, which, after some extraordinary investigations, obliged the Foundation’s auditor to withdraw the 2021, 2022, and 2023 reports.<\/p>\n The Optima group was already facing significant financial difficulties at the beginning of 2024 after acquiring a stake in the real estate companies. This can be seen from the part of the \u00c1SZ document detailing one of Optima’s additional fund-raising, the purchase of bonds from the Neumann J\u00e1nos University Foundation (NJE Foundation).<\/p>\n Optima has also signed a repayment option agreement and commitment letters with the NJE Foundation for the bonds purchased in three parts, totaling 127.5 billion HUF (about 320 million EUR at the current exchange rate). In this way, \u00c1SZ considers that Optima created the impression that the bonds were in fact liquid, i.e., the Foundation could easily buy them back.<\/p>\n In fact, in January 2024, when the NJE Foundation wanted to convert the bonds into cash, Optima was unable to complete the redemption. According to the draft report, negotiations between the Optima Group and the University Foundation on the retiming of the repayment were still ongoing in January 2025. According to the draft, \u00c1SZ believes that the full repayment is unlikely to be made.<\/p>\n \u00c1SZ also highlights overlaps between the parties involved in the transaction. As of 2020, the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the NJE Foundation and the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Pallas Ath\u00e9n\u00e9 Domus Meriti Foundation were the same person, Norbert Csizmadia. Csizmadia previously worked with Gy\u00f6rgy Matolcsy in the Ministry of National Economy and in the Central Bank as well.<\/p>\n The draft report of \u00c1SZ also covers billions of forints of investments by several companies founded by Optima. These details show that part of the Hungarian National Bank’s foundation money went to the circle of Gy\u00f6rgy Matolcsy’s son.<\/p>\n One such item, presented in detail, is the BOKK investment, a real estate investment project in Balatonakarattya. According to \u00c1SZ, a company set up by Optima contracted with companies belonging to the same circle of interests to carry out a large part of this multi-billion HUF project. Around 4.6 billion HUF (11.5 million EUR at the current exchange rate) was paid to this group.<\/p>\n Behind the beneficiary interest (Raw Development Kft., Somlai Property Kft.) there is B\u00e1lint Somlai, a Hungarian entrepreneur who owes a significant part of his wealth to orders from the MNB. Somlai belongs to the circle of former central bank governor’s son, \u00c1d\u00e1m Matolcsy. Adam Matolcsy previously confirmed to Direkt36 that he and Somlai are in the same group of friends.<\/p>\n Mr. Somlai did not respond to our request, and \u00c1d\u00e1m Matolcsy has now said that “I regret that I am not in a position to answer your questions about personal or business relations with Mr. Somlai, as these are private matters.”<\/p>\n The rise of B\u00e1lint Somlai, his business activities, and his relationship with the son of the former central bank governor were previously reported<\/a> in detail by Direkt36. We have presented the expensive sports cars used by Somlai and \u00c1d\u00e1m Matolcsy and revealed in detail<\/a> how the construction costs of the Postapalota, also linked to the Hungarian National Bank and built by Somlai’s interests, were soaring.<\/p>\n According to the draft report of \u00c1SZ, a very similar case to the BOKK investment occurred in a project of another company founded by Optima. This concerned the Burg Hotel in the 1st district of Budapest. In this case, almost 99% of the total value of the contracts, 8.5 billion HUF (more than 21 million EUR at the current exchange rate), was contracted with companies owned by Mr. Somlai.<\/p>\n At the end of the draft report, \u00c1SZ makes recommendations to the heads of the audited organizations over several pages. Among other things, it recommends that the chairman of the foundation’s board of trustees should ensure that the company structure is simplified and that a control system is put in place that covers all the organizations that actually invest the foundation’s assets.<\/p>\n The document draws attention to the fact that the heads of the audited organizations are required to prepare an action plan for \u00c1SZ in relation to the findings. \u00c1SZ also refers to the legal provision that if the action plan is not sent on time or is not acceptable, the head of the audited organization may be subject to criminal or disciplinary proceedings.<\/p>\n According to the \u00c1SZ Act, \u00c1SZ sends its findings to the heads of the audited organizations, who have 15 days to comment on them in writing. \u00c1SZ replies within 30 days. \u00c1SZ’s final reports are public and available on its website.<\/p>\n Before the end of Gy\u00f6rgy Matolcsy’s term as MNB President, there were strange transactions around the Optima Group.<\/p>\nFoundation in “imminent danger”<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Running for their money<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\u00c1d\u00e1m Matolcsy’s circle<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Manoeuvre in the final days of Matolcsy’s presidency<\/strong><\/h2>\n