Balatonhenye is a tiny village north of Lake Balaton in a beautiful area which is a candidate for the UNESCO World Heritage List. We first showed drone recordings a year ago of a large construction project there. The estate by now has grown as large as the one owned by the Prime Minister’s father in Hatvanpuszta. The building project was started in 2019 by the CEO of the Hungarian Tourism Agency, Zoltán Guller, who afterwards passed it on to his relatives and close acquaintances. The real estate is now owned by a capital fund managed by the company of a friend of István Tiborcz, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s son-in-law. With the help of Member of Parliament Ákos Hadházy, we photographed from a small aircraft the nearly 20,000 square meter estate located in a nature reserve area.

He has lived in Hungary for forty years, has a Hungarian wife and children, but his permanent residence permit has now been rejected by Hungary. Alexey Lugovcov is an Ukrainian businessman who was named „second-in-command” of Russian organized crime boss Semion Mogilevich in Budapest, by a 1996 report attributed to the FBI. Lugovcov‘s name has appeared in the Hungarian press several times in connection with this allegation, but he has never made a statement about the matter – he claims not because no one has ever asked. Now, however, he himself reached out to investigative journalists because he suspects that the Constitution Protection Office has decided that his permanent residence would endanger Hungary’s national security, due to what he claims were unfounded press reports.

According to contracts and documents seen by Átlátszó, Alapjogokért Központ (Center for Fundamental Rights), a government organized NGO which supplies pro-government talking heads and all-round expertise to media outlets distributing government propaganda, have received nearly 1 billion HUF (cca. 3,3 million USD) in grants from the PM’s Cabinet Office channelled through the Batthyány Lajos Alapítvány, a secretive grantmaker foundation.