Company linked to Orbán’s brother won major public tender with the highest bid

A consortium of companies, including a firm whose owner is linked to Győző Orbán Jr., a brother of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor, won a major public tender of the National Tax and Customs Authority (NAV) despite submitting the highest bid, a Direkt36 investigation has found.

The consortium’s offer was close to 1 billion forints (3.2 million euros) in the tender initiated by NAV to buy 2500 printers. Five other bidders entered the tender and all of them offered lower prices. Still, their offers were eliminated by NAV, which argued that they did not meet the technical conditions outlined in the tender documentation.

Sources close to the eliminated companies told Direkt36 that the conditions were tailored to Xerox type of printers, and only the eventual winner had the contractual background to offer these models.

NAV declined to respond to Direkt36’s questions, saying that they do not comment on ongoing matters. The procedure is indeed not over yet. Even though NAV chose the winner, the other bidders have the right to challenge the decision.

The member of the winning consortium linked to Győző Orbán Jr. is called IMG Solution. As Direkt36 showed in a previous story, the firm’s manager and co-owner, Gábor Szentgyörgyi, has had a long personal relationship with the prime minister’s brother. This relationship is linked to wrestling.

Győző Orbán Jr. had been a wrestler in his teenage years and returned to the sport in his 30s, even winning the European Championship in his age group. He has also been a prominent leader of the Hungarian wrestling scene: records show that he is the honorary president of a sport club, of which Gábor Szentgyörgyi is also a member. Orbán and Szentgyörgyi even went on a trip organized by the club, news reports and photos show.

IMG Solution, a company selling IT and office products, produced spectacular growth in just a few years. In 2012, its revenues were only 46 million forints (150 thousand euros), but in 2015, it made 4.7 billion forints (15.2 million euros), meaning that it grew by 100 times. The company, which does not even have a functioning website, managed to accomplish this after a series of victories in lucrative state tenders.

András Pethő

András is a co-founder, editor and executive director of Direkt36. Previously, he was a senior editor for leading Hungarian news site Origo before it had been transformed into the government’s propaganda outlet. He also worked for the BBC World Service in London and was a reporter at the investigative unit of The Washington Post. He has contributed to several international reporting projects, including The Panama Papers. He twice won the Soma Prize, the prestigious annual award dedicated to investigative journalism in Hungary. He was a World Press Institute fellow in 2008, a Humphrey fellow at the University of Maryland in 2012/13, and a Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 2019/20. András has taught journalism courses at Hungarian universities.
András Szabó

András worked eight years as a journalist at Origo, a then prestigious online news site, but also spent several years at Index and vs.hu news outlets. At Direkt36 he covers Russian-Hungarian relations, activities of business circles close to Fidesz, and political decision making processes of the Orbán government. In 2011 he received the Gőbölyös Soma Award dedicated to investigative journalism in Hungary, and in 2010 he won the Quality Journalism Award, both for a series of articles that focused on a corruption case connected to the former Socialist-led government.