2014 was a prosperous year for 5th district’s mysterious entrepreneur

Forrás: Belváros-Lipótváros Önkormányzata

2015. May 27.

Downtown Billions

Profits nearly tripled for the construction company that has been awarded lucrative contracts by the 5th district while its owner keeps working in a hotel as an employee.

EU-Line does not have a website and has shown no efforts to seek publicity in other ways either. Now, however, the company would have a chance to share a real success story.

Last year, the construction firm nearly tripled its profit compared to 2013. It has produced profits more than HUF 137 million (EUR 444 thousand) while its revenue was HUF 1.68 billion (EUR 5,4 million), EU-Line’s annual business report shows.

Direkt36 has recently published a story about EU-Line, showing that the company has accumulated – partly as member of several consortia – state contracts worth at least HUF 6.4 billion (EUR 21.3 million) since its creation in 2011. The company received the vast majority of these contracts from the municipality of Budapest’s 5th district during the last three years of Antal Rogán’s term as mayor.

The article revealed that the company’s owner, András Bódis, who had not had serious experience in running businesses or executing major construction projects, still works as a hotel employee, despite his company’s success.

The investigation also showed that there are several indirect links between the company and János Borzován, a businessman with a long history in construction business. Bódis and Borzován confirmed that they know each other but they also claim that their relationship has nothing to do with EU-Line’s activities.

“I founded EU-Line not with the purpose of making a living but as an investment because I saw an opportunity to be present in a certain area of the construction industry”, Bódis wrote in a comment for the previous article. He also claimed not to have taken any money out of EU-Line yet.

EU-Line’s latest annual report showed that no dividend was paid to Bódis from last year’s profit either.

The report does not reveal how much of last year’s revenue was coming from state sources. In a comment for the previous article, Bódis said that EU-Line is working for private companies as well but he declined to provide details of these works. He said that he could do this only with the permission of their clients and he suggested that he was not inclined to contact them regarding this matter.

  • 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.