Lawyers of bondholders told Direkt36 that hundreds of thousands of euros were stuck with the intermediary company VolDan. Meanwhile, the company’s Hungarian representative office has become unavailable, and the company is under a compulsory strike off procedure from the official registry of companies.

Official document shows that Andrey Naryshkin, who acquired residency permit in the Hungarian golden visa scheme, had his registered home address in a property owned by pro-government businessman Shabtai Michaeli’s company just a few months ago. According to the government, Naryshkin’s residency permit was revoked by the counterintelligence service two years ago, but the case was stalled in court.

Fidesz MEPs did not vote for the revision of the visas already issued. Several beneficiaries of Putin’s regime have previously obtained Hungarian papers.

In the past 12 years, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government has gotten into a situation many times, when they had to decide between the interests of Western allies, or Russia. Direkt36 has revealed many cases, where, in the end, the government favored Vladimir Putin and his circles. It occurred, for example, that they drove a Hungarian company out of business, just to be able to make space for a Russian firm.

In the past two years, over 9 thousand foreigners received residence permits for “other purposes”. Most of them came from Iran, China, the United States and Russia. Hungary’s Immigration Office Claims that that it does not have any statistical data about why exactly the applicants of such permits wish to reside in Hungary.

A state secretary earlier said that problematic residence permits had already been revoked. He must have referred to other people.

Atiya Khoury, who is on the US sanction list, used an address in South Moscow to apply for residence permit through Hungary’s controversial Golden Visa Program. His application was handled by a company with ties to Viktor Orbán’s advisor.

Documents obtained by Direkt36 prove that a Georgian-Israeli businessman close to Árpád Habony was involved in the operations of VolDan, the company that sold Hungarian residency bonds in Russia.

A joint investigation of Direkt36, 444 and Novaya Gazeta about Russian parliamentary members, executives of state-owned companies, the family of the chief of Russian foreign intelligence service and a businessman reportedly linked to organised crime.

Hungarian authorities raised no objections against granting Atiya Khoury a Hungarian residence permit when he had already been on the US sanction list for supporting Bashar al-Assad’s regime.