Goulash: Spyware Menace Over Central Europe; Orbán’s Family in Londongrad

FRESH FROM VSQUARE

EUROPEAN COUNTRIES SPEND AT LEAST €1.4 BILLION ON ‘DANGEROUS’ PALANTIR

Palantir CEO Alex Karp says Europe should be grateful for his services, and at least 11 European governments have listened, paying the Peter Thiel-co-founded company at least €1.4 billion. A cross-border investigation led by Follow the Money, together with Frontstory.pl and other partners, found Palantir software running in eight European armies and five national police forces. Closer to home, Polish ministries used it to track the movements of Ukrainian refugees, including minors, while the presidents of Poland and Lithuania are now courting Karp as Europe’s sovereignty debate heats up. Read the investigation here.

PEGASUS AND MERCENARY SPYWARE ATTACKS ON SERBIAN PRO-DEMOCRACY FIGURES

Hungary may have stopped using Pegasus, but next door in Serbia the spyware is apparently still on the menu. Citizen Lab found that the phone of Vladan Đokić, Rector of the University of Belgrade and a prominent backer of the student protest movement, was hacked with Pegasus this year through a zero-click exploit. Rade Bajić, a prosecutor removed from the corruption probe into Belgrade’s “Trump Tower” project, received an Apple threat notification in August, bringing the number of Serbian civil society members known to have been targeted with mercenary spyware to at least 16 just days before the country’s October 25 snap elections. Read it here.

JOURNALIST ADMITS TO RECEIVING CASH TO PROMOTE FAKE RUSSIAN THINK TANK

The International Burke Institute claims to be an Israeli think tank, but it has a roster of fake and dead experts, a “Sovereignty Index” ranking Russia as the world’s fourth most sovereign country, and a budget pitched to Kremlin propaganda overseers at the Social Design Agency troll farm. Delfi Estonia and Israel’s Shomrim traced that its founders have links to Alexey Martynov, a Sergey Kiriyenko-decorated Kremlin commentator whom Estonian authorities suspect of hostile intelligence activity. One journalist who promoted the index in The Jerusalem Post admitted she was paid in cash, then quickly tried to take it back. Read the story here.

INSIDE THE SPYWARE PIPELINE HIDDEN IN ONLINE ADVERTISING

Turns out the ad you scroll past can be the main course: Citizen Lab found that Israeli ad firm Discover-Tech served as a bridge between the spyware industry and the world’s biggest ad exchanges, delivering zero-click Candiru spyware to at least 45 Al Jazeera devices. Google and the IAB had certified the company for years, until this month. Its ads reached NATO and EU institutions and defense ministries. Czechia ranked ninth in the world for Discover-Tech bids, and the report also notes Candiru infrastructure linked to Hungary. 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 DAUGHTER AND SON-IN-LAW SWAP NEW YORK FOR LONDON

In late August 2025, Viktor Orbán’s daughter Ráhel and son-in-law István Tiborcz moved to the United States with their children. Days later, a reader photographed them eating falafel at Chelsea Market in Manhattan. Soon, Ráhel had announced on Instagram that she had been admitted to an American university. This September, however, the couple was spotted getting out of a Mercedes G-Class with Hungarian license plates on Tavistock Street in London’s Covent Garden neighborhood. Asked by news site Telex whether the family had relocated to London, Tiborcz’s BDPST Group said only that they had been living abroad for more than a year, declining to confirm whether they had moved to the UK. According to multiple sources with ties to the Orbán-era business elite, Tiborcz and his wife have indeed relocated to London. 

One source claimed that, with Trump’s grip on power weakening, it seems that the couple no longer considered the United States safe enough for them and have enrolled their children in private schools in the UK. London’s proximity to Hungary also makes it easier for them to manage their Hungarian assets, which, according to the sources, they are now trying to sell off. “Everything is for sale. They’re trying to leave as few assets in Hungary as possible,” said a source who knows the couple personally. Their business empire flourished thanks to government contracts and state-backed opportunities during Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power. But that stream of business has now dried up, and the authorities are perceived by the former Orbán-era elite as openly hostile. In relocating to London, the couple is following a well-trodden path: for decades, the British capital has served as a second home for oligarchs and businessmen from Russia and other former Soviet republics, earning it the nickname “Londongrad.”

Meanwhile, Tiborcz’s former business partner Dániel Jellinek, head of Indotek Group and Hungary’s seventh-richest man, was taken into custody in September on suspicion of bribery. On October 16, a court ended his pre-trial detention and placed him under house arrest with electronic monitoring, partly because he had provided a substantive statement and cooperated with investigators. A source familiar with Jellinek’s defense strategy claimed that the businessman is willing to negotiate a plea agreement and disclose potentially damaging information about his dealings with the Orbán-era elite. I contacted Tiborcz’s company, BDPST Zrt., for comment but received no response.

ORBÁN CRONIES GO +1 TO DODGE PEGASUS SURVEILLANCE

Now that Hungarian authorities are finally investigating the crimes of the Orbán era, many formerly powerful businessmen and politically connected figures are, like Jellinek, in the crosshairs of multiple investigations. A day before this newsletter went out, prosecutors detained György Matolcsy, Orbán’s former economy minister, chief economic ideologue and governor of the National Bank of Hungary from 2013 to 2025, on suspicion of economic fraud causing major financial damage and use of a forged private document. On the same day, police issued an international arrest warrant for his son, Ádám Matolcsy. No wonder many others fear prosecutors and police may come for them too: corruption was everywhere in the Orbán era.

According to sources connected to Orbán’s business circles, a peculiar countersurveillance measure is catching on: switching to US phone numbers with the +1 country code. Why? Blame the 2021 Pegasus Project, in which a consortium of journalists, including yours truly, uncovered how the Israeli spyware Pegasus was abused in Hungary against journalists, activists and other political targets. Our reporting also revealed that NSO Group, the company behind Pegasus, barred its clients from infecting phones with US numbers, so as not to anger Washington by exposing American citizens to foreign surveillance. Fast forward to today: people close to the Orbán elite are now paranoid that they themselves could become Pegasus targets, and an American number is seen as protection. However, according to my sources in Hungary’s national security apparatus, the country no longer has a Pegasus contract or surveillance quotas. Maybe these Hungarians didn’t get the memo. Or maybe they’re worried about investigators in other countries where they also may have broken the law. (Check out Amnesty International’s recent analysis on Pegasus here.)

BREWING IN THE BOTTOM

VSquare’s Tamara Kaňuchová talked with experts about Czechia’s recent and Slovakia’s upcoming elections.

Czech local and Senate election results give the opposition an opening—and the government a wake-up call. Slovakia is next. The Czech Republic held municipal and Senate elections in early October. Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’s ruling ANO party suffered major setbacks in both. ANO failed to win a single Senate seat, leaving it with 14 seats in the upper house of parliament. The opposition maintained its majority, with opposition candidates winning 22 of the 27 seats contested in the 81-member Senate. If the numbers sound confusing, that’s because a different third of the Senate is elected every two years. The Senate serves as a safeguard for democratic decision-making, reviewing legislation passed by the lower house and playing a crucial role in constitutional amendments.

Senate elections have historically been a weak spot for governing parties, particularly ANO. “In elections of this type, voters can generally afford to take more risks and vote with their hearts; quite simply, there is less at stake. These elections took place after the new coalition’s first year in power—a period during which the proposed size of the state budget deficit has been resonating strongly and negatively throughout Czech society. A number of opposition parties managed to exploit this situation very effectively during their campaigns,” David Jágr, a political scientist at Charles University, told VSquare.

Vít Rakušan, leader of the opposition STAN party, the third-largest party in parliament, said the result was “beyond expectations” and is positioning his party as ANO’s main challenger in the coming years. “A segment of the population is probably beginning to realize that many election promises were completely detached from economic reality. Moreover, the governing parties have so far failed to offer many positive solutions or to make any effort toward significant reforms,” Jágr told us. For now, however, ANO’s support has declined only slightly in the latest polls.

“This is, of course, huge momentum for the opposition. Babiš seems to have hit some kind of psychological end—a psychological turning point in his tenure. I think ANO is undoubtedly nervous, and it will have implications for how they conduct themselves in politics; we’ll likely see a more radical stance from the governing coalition, and they’ll start taking a harder line on certain issues,” said Pavel Havlíček, a research fellow at AMO in Prague. “That’ll have major implications—a significant boost for the opposition parties and, at the same time, a major blow to the governing coalition parties, who’ll actually have to respond to it and react in some way, and they’ll then have to adjust their positions accordingly.” STAN also performed strongly in Prague, followed by the SPOLU coalition, Prague Together (Praha Sobě), and ANO. The result puts STAN in a strong position to negotiate a new coalition at the municipal level. Architect Petr Hlaváček has already expressed interest in becoming Prague’s next mayor.

This coming weekend, Slovakia will hold its own local elections, with similar patterns emerging as governing coalition and opposition parties compete for control of major cities. However, more than 50% of mayoral candidates nationwide are running without party backing. In Bratislava, incumbent mayor Matúš Vallo faces a tighter-than-expected race against Transport Minister Jozef Ráž, who is running as an independent but was nominated for his ministerial post by Smer.

MORE FROM OUR PARTNERS

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

ALMOST A MILLION EUROS FROM HUNGARY: HUNGARIAN ALLIANCE POLITICIANS GOT MONEY FROM AN UNKNOWN ASSOCIATION. ProRegia Cultura, an obscure Slovak association, received €988,000 from the Orbán government’s Gábor Bethlen Fund for opinion polls that left no trace. Instead, its payroll was full of politicians of the Hungarian Alliance party, plus their district coordinators and campaign activists, according to the Investigative Center of Ján Kuciak. (Text in Slovak.) 

ANO COUNCILLOR IN MARIÁNSKÉ LÁZNĚ USES TWO UNIVERSITY TITLES. IT’S UNCLEAR HOW HE GOT THEM. Investigace.cz reveals how Miloslav Chadim, a councilor of Babiš’s ANO party, signs as JUDr. and Mgr.—but Charles University and the University of West Bohemia, where he claims to have earned these degrees, say he never studied there, and his Moscow psychology diploma reportedly dates from years he spent fixing switchboards as a hotel electrician in Mariánské Lázně. (Text in Czech.)

HUNGARIAN GOVERNMENT ADMITS WRONGDOING, SETTLES LAWSUIT BROUGHT BY ÁTLÁTSZÓ AGAINST SOVEREIGNTY PROTECTION OFFICE. The Orbán-era Sovereignty Protection Office branded Átlátszó a spy outfit, but now that it has been abolished, the Justice Ministry of Péter Magyar’s government has admitted it spread six false statements about the outlet and agreed to pay HUF 3.8 million in damages plus legal costs. (Text in English and Hungarian.)

HOW A COMPANY OF HUNGARY’S RICHEST MAN HELPED VIKTOR ORBÁN’S FATHER PROFIT FROM LARGE GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS. Direkt36 obtained leaked files from Lőrinc Mészáros’s construction giant V-Híd showing that Győző Orbán’s mines sold at least 400,000 tons of stone worth nearly €10.4 million to state projects, from the M1 highway to the Budapest–Belgrade railway. In one case, V-Híd wired €2.1 million to the elder Orbán’s company the same day his invoice arrived. (Text in English and Hungarian.)

PUTIN’S “DOPPELGÄNGERS”: THE INSIDER GETS INSIDE THE OPERATIONS OF THE KREMLIN’S FOREIGN DISINFORMATION NETWORK. Hacked correspondence obtained by The Insider shows how Sergey Kiriyenko’s “ideological troops,” a team of MGIMO alumni, Foreign Ministry staff and former Prigozhin trolls, cooked up fake stories about Zelensky’s yacht and Olena Zelenska’s shopping sprees that made it all the way to JD Vance and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Read it here.

THE NATIONALIST DREAM REALITY IS AI GENERATED. In Eurozine, VSquare’s Tamara Kaňuchová shows how Slovakia’s pro-Russian biker club Brat za Brata, whose leader has met SVR chief Sergei Naryshkin, swaps its real look of middle-aged men in bomber jackets for AI-generated blond Slavic warriors and Disney-style animal brotherhoods, and traces the parallels to Nazi propaganda aesthetics.

A CHORUS OF CONTRADICTIONS ACROSS EUROPE. EK Strategic Communications Center tracks how Kremlin-aligned channels covered October’s protest wave in France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Albania by cheering the protesters, blaming migrants and alleging government-orchestrated chaos, all at the same time.

INFORMATIONAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL MEASURES: ESTONIA’S SPY CHIEF TURNS RUSSIA’S DOCTRINE AGAINST IT. In an exclusive interview with Holger Roonemaa’s The Baltic Flank, Estonian intelligence chief Kaupo Rosin says he doesn’t expect a Russian incursion within the next year, and argues, in terminology borrowed straight from Moscow’s own textbooks, that Europe should start answering Russia with its own methods.

POLAND CONDEMNS UKRAINIAN REGION FOR HONOURING FIGURES ASSOCIATED WITH WWII MASSACRES OF POLES. Notes from Poland reports that Lviv’s regional council has declared 2027 the year of the UPA and its commander Roman Shukhevych, prompting Warsaw to condemn the move as contrary to European values and Foreign Minister Sikorski to bar the councillor behind it from Poland, just as the two countries had begun making progress on reconciling over the Volhynia massacres.

This was VSquare’s 72nd 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