Goulash: Orbán’s Vanishing Act; Vučić and Putin Target Serbia’s Civil Society; Átlátszó Turns 15

FRESH FROM VSQUARE

“HYBRID WAR OVER OUR OWN DEMOCRACY AND SOVEREIGNTY”: HOW VUČIĆ AND PUTIN TARGET SERBIA’S CIVIL SOCIETY

Russian hackers posing as a Belarusian dissident spent nearly a month inside a Belgrade think tank’s systems, accessing its emails more than 28,000 times — a joint operation by groups tied to both the SVR and the GRU. But as Srđan Cvijić of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy tells VSquare’s Tamara Kaňuchová, the scariest part isn’t the stolen documents — it’s that in Serbia, Moscow and the Vučić regime often chase the same enemies. With elections looming and Vučić unlikely to follow Orbán’s example of conceding peacefully, Cvijić expects escalation. Read the full interview here. 

WE FOUND VICTIMS OF SECRET DRUGGING — A PROBLEM SLOVAKIA’S AUTHORITIES CAN’T SEE

The Investigative Center of Ján Kuciak’s (ICJK) Kristína Böhmer mapped at least ten cases of drink spiking in Slovakia — victims secretly drugged with substances ranging from GHB to a dangerous barbiturate-amphetamine cocktail, often as a prelude to rape or robbery. The Slovak state’s official count of such cases: zero. Read it here.

INSIDE THE EUROPEAN GAMBLING OPERATIONS OF A WANTED TURKISH BUSINESSMAN

Turkish betting magnate Fedlan Kılıçaslan made quite an entrance in Warsaw: a custom-built Ferrari with vanity plates; an apartment on the 50th floor of the Złota 44 tower bought by his company for nearly €7 million; and a self-styled philanthropist image. What he didn’t advertise: an Interpol Red Notice, a Polish money-laundering probe, and a Warsaw-registered “IT company” that promoted gambling sites blacklisted in Turkey — with no Polish license to do so. A joint investigation by Frontstory.pl, OCCRP, TVN24, NGL.media, and CIReN untangles the whole operation — from a casino job in northern Cyprus to an arrest in Barcelona. Read the thrilling investigation here.

“NATO MEMBERSHIP WILL NOT PROTECT YOU”: HOW KREMLIN PROPAGANDA AGAINST THE BALTICS ESCALATED

In May, Russian propaganda combined unrelated Baltic events — drone alerts, a strike on an empty Latvian oil depot, power outages — into one menacing narrative: the Baltics were “complicit” in Ukrainian attacks on Russia and would face consequences. The story traveled from Telegram channels all the way to the U.N. Security Council, where Russia’s ambassador warned Latvia that “NATO membership will not protect you.” Re:Baltica’s Anastasija Supe-Tetarenko maps the amplification chain. Read it here.

SPICY SCOOPS

There is always a lot of information that we hear and find interesting and newsworthy but don’t publish as part of our investigative reporting — and share instead in this newsletter.

ORBÁN’S VANISHING ACT: NO TRACE OF THE FORMER PM’S SCHEDULES

Followers of Hungarian politics may remember the reports that surfaced right after Viktor Orbán’s April 12 election defeat: paper shredders working overtime in the foreign ministry and across government bodies. Now, as Péter Magyar’s government has taken control of the archives, journalists like myself have started requesting the public records the Orbán regime kept from us — and a string of freedom of information replies reveals just how thoroughly Orbán’s people wiped the systems. My FOIA request for Orbán’s daily schedules and agendas from his final 2022–2026 term came back with this: “With regard to Viktor Orbán’s official programs, the Prime Minister’s Office does not maintain a registry containing recorded data.” The only thing on file about the man who ran Hungary for 16 years? That he used up his prorated vacation days, and even then there were no details which days he took off or where he went. “The Prime Minister’s Office does not possess any other data,” according to the reply. 

Among other things, I tried to learn more about Orbán’s secret trip to Riyadh in October 2022 to meet Mohammad bin Salman — a journey aboard an official Hungarian Air Force plane, surrounded by bodyguards and his most trusted assistant, but with orders to keep everything under wraps. When I asked the Prime Minister’s Office for documents on the trip’s organization, or even simply its purpose, the answer to that FOIA request was the same: nothing to be found. Those familiar with the regime’s relationship with the public will recall that Orbán never had a public agenda; journalists relied on readers’ tips and insiders to learn where the PM would show up. But my requests now reveal something more remarkable: either no official schedule was ever kept by his own office, or it was wiped on the way out. Either way, reconstructing Orbán’s days in office — whom he met, where, and why — just became extremely difficult. Meanwhile, a similar answer came back regarding Antal Rogán, Orbán’s propaganda chief and most influential minister — while at least his days off were dutifully recorded, his official schedule is nowhere to be found. 

POLAND’S PKO BANK RUMORED TO BE EYEING ORBÁN OLIGARCHY’S CROWN JEWEL

In previous issues, I covered how Orbán’s economic empire is disintegrating with his fall — including a Czech bid to reacquire, possibly at a discount, the Czechia-based aircraft manufacturer Aero Vodochody that had ended up in the hands of Orbán proxies. The pattern is structural: businesses and banks led by Orbán loyalists relied so heavily on state support, from procurements to loans, that with Orbán gone, their business models are collapsing — a vast empire heading either for bankruptcy or the bargain bin. Which brings us to MBH Bank (Magyar Bankholding), the artificially assembled financial conglomerate built with heavy state support and majority-owned by interests of Orbán’s wallet, billionaire Lőrinc Mészáros. MBH grew into Hungary’s number two bank, with the thinly veiled ambition of dethroning businessman Sándor Csányi’s OTP empire. Now that MBH’s political patrons are gone, sources in both finance and diplomacy have been telling me the same scoop for weeks: Poland’s PKO Bank — the country’s largest, with regional ambitions — is eyeing an entry into the Hungarian market, as part of which it would bid for MBH’s corporate banking branch, the segment where MBH is Hungary’s close number two (after OTP).

Multiple Hungarian government-connected and financial expert sources told me a possible PKO entry was on the agenda of recent high-level Polish-Hungarian talks. The same sources allege that OTP may, in return, attempt an entry into the Polish market — a rumor a source close to OTP couldn’t confirm. The possibility of OTP itself going after MBH’s corporate branch was denied by multiple sources close to OTP, citing regulatory hurdles over market concentration; officially, however, OTP only told me they don’t comment on potential or alleged acquisitions. PKO also sent a short “we do not comment” reply to my colleague Daniel Flis’s inquiry. However, a source familiar with PKO’s thinking confirmed to me that a Hungarian entry is indeed planned — but that any deal involving MBH could only happen once Mészáros and the Orbán oligarchy are rooted out of the bank. They’d be pretty open to deal with the new Hungarian government; becoming co-owners with, or even negotiating alongside, Orbán’s stooges is a reputational risk they likely won’t take. Note: MBH is the same bank that financed election campaigns of European far-right parties.

BREWING IN THE BOTTOM

In an exclusive interview, I asked Tamás Bodoky, editor-in-chief of the non-profit investigative site Átlátszó, to revisit their 15-year journey in Hungarian journalism, the challenges they faced under Orbán — and what comes next.

Happy birthday! Why did you launch Átlátszó 15 years ago, and under what circumstances did it come into being?

After I left Hungary’s largest news site, Index, I couldn’t find a newsroom where I would have wanted to continue doing investigative journalism. I became convinced that Hungary needed a nonprofit investigative newspaper or publisher — one where journalistic freedom would not be limited by political or business entanglements at the ownership or publisher level. I wasn’t able to secure funding for the project in advance, so Átlátszó essentially began as an experiment in 2011. But because it proved successful, that experiment has continued ever since.

What did you want to do differently from other Hungarian online news sites?

Over the course of my career before Átlátszó, there were several occasions when my investigative work was constrained by factors that had nothing to do with journalism. That is why I believed a nonprofit publisher was needed — one where, for example, the publisher’s advertisers or the owner’s business partners could not become taboo subjects, and where, in the face of political or legal attacks against published articles, the publisher would defend the work rather than back down. I saw no point in launching yet another daily news site. I wanted to produce stories based on original reporting — stories that would be newsworthy in the Hungarian media, primarily by following the trail of public money. Beyond traditional reporting and requests for comment, I planned to obtain exclusive information through freedom-of-information requests, lawsuits to enforce those requests when necessary, and leaks. For the latter, we created a secure, anonymous whistleblowing platform. Materials submitted to us are then verified through journalistic research.

Which stories from over the years are you most proud of?

There are many. I am especially proud of the cases where we were the first to uncover issues that later became national scandals. Examples include the estate-building and business empire of Lőrinc Mészáros, the former mayor of Felcsút; the enrichment of the prime minister’s son-in-law through public money; the private jets and yachts secretly used by government politicians and oligarchs close to the ruling party; the creative use of European Union funds by politically connected actors; and the environmental problems connected to the arrival of the battery industry in Hungary. We were the first in Hungary to conduct camera-drone investigations, and we also launched a freedom of information request system that anyone can use.

What major attacks have you faced from the Orbán regime?

The Orbán regime wanted to replace the entire Hungarian press with loyalists, and they were hostile toward us from the beginning. The first major scandal was the source-protection case in 2011. Authorities wanted to identify the source of one of our articles, and the police seized a hard drive from my apartment roughly two weeks after we launched. After a successful appeal to the Constitutional Court, the case ultimately resulted in stronger legal safeguards for journalistic source protection. Then came the Norwegian Civil Fund affair in 2014, with articles smearing us and threatening political statements. The government raided the foundation distributing the grants, and as a beneficiary, we ended up on some kind of blacklist.

Later, during the campaign to drive out the Open Society Foundations, we were attacked as George Soros’s bloggers or even his local agents. After a successful investigation — we found out how much money the government-aligned Civil Cooperation Forum had received from a state-owned company and infiltrated one of their trips to Warsaw — that group also turned against us. Over the past 10 years, the rhetoric of the attacks has steadily become harsher. Toward the end, we were labeled a national security risk and accused of treason. The government even created a state authority called the Sovereignty Protection Office, which first launched investigations into Transparency International Hungary and Átlátszó. Had there not been a change of government this year, I do not believe we could have survived another four years. There was a clear government intention to ban Átlátszó.

What are Átlátszó’s plans for the next 15 years?

The way to survive the Orbán era was to plan only one year at a time. Even then, we were hit by unpleasant surprises, so we do not have fully developed long-term plans. The goal is to make our current level of operations sustainable and to rely increasingly on reader revenue. A major priority is developing video content. In addition to written articles, we want to produce more video reports, because we see that they reach a much larger audience and are a better way to connect with younger generations. After years of domestic trench warfare, we would like to reconnect with international journalistic networks and take part in more cross-border collaborations than we do now. Beyond nationally significant political topics, we also want to investigate issues that do not usually meet the threshold of mainstream media attention. In addition to monitoring the spending of public money, we want to do much more work on environmental and rural stories. Because of climate change, for example, interest in agricultural stories has grown enormously.

MORE FROM OUR PARTNERS

If you like our scoops and stories, here are some more articles from our partners!

KOČNER AND PARA GRILLED ANDRUSKÓ. THE CROWN WITNESS ANSWERED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS — AND SAID HE REPEATEDLY FELT LIKE AN IDIOT. In the third Kuciak murder trial, Marian Kočner and his lawyer spent hours picking at contradictions in crown witness Zoltán Andruskó’s eight-year-old testimony — including who photographed the surveillance images of the journalist that link Kočner to the murder. (Text in Slovak.)

BABIŠ, ORBÁN, AND AGROFERT’S BILLION-CROWN BUSINESS IN HUNGARY. As the Babiš–Orbán friendship deepened, the Czech PM’s Agrofert holding collected Hungarian state subsidies, billions of crowns in loans from MBH Bank — part-owned by the state and Orbán’s childhood friend Lőrinc Mészáros — and a stake in a Romanian firm whose ownership structure included two former ministers of Orbán’s government, Investigace’s Barbora Šturmová reports. (Text in Czech.) 

“WE ALL CARRY A SPY IN OUR POCKET” — NATALIA KRAPIVA OF ACCESS NOW ON THE SURVEILLANCE OF JOURNALISTS AND CIVILIANS. In Átlátszó’s interview, Access Now’s senior tech-legal counsel argues that the new Hungarian government’s promise to expose Orbán-era spying is a good start — but, as Poland’s example shows, investigating past abuses means little without safeguards against future ones. (Text in English and Hungarian.) 

A DEVASTATING HOSPITAL REPORT HIDDEN FROM THE PUBLIC FOR A DECADE UNDER THE ORBÁN GOVERNMENT. A classified 2015 inspection obtained by Direkt36 — released only after the elections — found that not a single Hungarian hospital met the legal minimum standards for safe patient care, with 1,565 specialist doctors missing and even defibrillators absent from one in seven departments; the Orbán government simply shelved the report. (Text in English and Hungarian.)

DESSERT AND FURTHER READINGS

For those still hungry for more, we’re finishing today’s menu with a couple of recommendations from our friends and colleagues.

RUSSIA WEAPONIZES CIVILIAN TANKER IN BALTIC SEA, SURVEILLANCE IMAGES SHOW. In this OCCRP investigation, Holger Roonemaa and Nathaniel Peutherer obtained Estonian border guard photos showing sandbagged firing positions and Kord heavy machine guns aboard the Gazprom tanker Marshal Vasilevskiy — a “civilian” ship supplying Kaliningrad whose passenger lists include at least 22 people with Russian military and FSB backgrounds.

“A TASK TO MAKE PLANS.” WHAT’S BEHIND THE WARNING OF RUSSIA’S PROVOCATIONS IN THE BALTICS. After a wave of alarming Western headlines, Estonian journalist Holger Roonemaa’s (he’s on fire!) sources across Baltic intelligence and security circles offer a sober corrective: Moscow has ordered plans for provocations drafted, but there’s no sign a decision to act has been made — and the fear itself may be the point.

EUROPE ISN’T GETTING ITS MONEY’S WORTH ON DEFENCE. The European Correspondent on rearmament’s uncomfortable arithmetic: Europe is spending more on defence than at any point since the Cold War, yet fragmented national procurement means the capability gains lag far behind the money.

“THE COUNTRY IS GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION”: PUBLIC OPINION DYNAMICS IN RUSSIA AMID THE FUEL CRISIS. A fresh EK Strategic Communications Center report by Evgenii Liamin shows how Russia’s fuel crisis — hitting 88 of 89 regions — is eroding Putin’s approval ratings and boosting anti-war sentiment ahead of the September Duma elections, while the Kremlin insists “the situation is normal.”

This was VSquare’s 69th Goulash newsletter. I hope you gobbled it up. Come back soon for another serving. 

Still hungry? Check the previous newsletter issues here! 

SZABOLCS PANYI & THE VSQUARE TEAM