Companies owned by Hungarian oligarch Lőrinc Mészáros — a longtime friend of former prime minister Viktor Orbán — donated heavily to a right-wing influence operation that peddled propaganda online for the ruling Fidesz party, according to a new investigation by ICIJ media partner Direkt36.

Confidential documents show that since at least 2022 the rail giant V-Híd Zrt. and other Mészáros Group construction firms transferred billions of forints, amounting to almost $13.5 million, to the Megafon Center, an organization that trained Orbán-friendly social media influencers.

Megafon was founded in 2020 to enlist “professional Facebook warriors” to spread conservative ideas, according to the independent media outlet Telex, which found that the organization later outspent both Fidesz and the Hungarian government on political advertising on the platform. Despite its advertising costs approaching $6 million in 2024, Megafon has never disclosed its donors and has claimed to receive no public funding.

Now, Direkt36 has identified payments from Mészáros firms to the organization over several years, accounting for an estimated third of its revenue in that period. The internal records obtained by Direkt36 and analyzed using ICIJ’s research platform Datashare contain previously undisclosed details about V-Híd’s operations.

The findings, which are part of the Mészáros Files investigation, are based on documents including donation agreements and receipts that show a nearly $1 million contribution by V-Híd to Megafon as early as 2022. A list of expenditures shows another Mészáros firm reportedly provided almost $300,000 to Megafon shortly before Hungary’s April 2022 parliamentary elections.

  • Recommended reading

“On behalf of the entire Megafon team, I would like to once again thank you for your previous support,” wrote Megafon’s founder István Kovács in a February 2023 email to V-Híd’s CEO. Only a week later, the records show, the construction firm’s finance department transferred another $1.4 million to Megafon shortly after a request for donations. It sent another $1.1 million a few months later, Direkt36 found.

The donations continued into 2024, when V-Híd provided about $9 million to Megafon, according to internal emails — one of several proposed contributions to the organization and its staff that year.

Representatives for V-Híd and Megafon did not respond to Direkt36’s requests for comment.

During Orbán’s 16 years in power, Mészáros grew his business empire with the help of lucrative government contracts. He credited the former leader for some of his success in media interviews.

“God, luck, and Viktor Orbán certainly played a role in getting me to where I am today,” he told Heti Válasz magazine in 2014. “But … I earned everything through my work and my wits.”

Billionaire Lőrinc Mészáros during a press conference about modernizing Hungary’s irrigation systems. Image: Government of Hungary

V-Híd is one of Mészáros’ most profitable companies and has received substantial public funds through contracts to modernize railway infrastructure and expand highways. Its website lists no commercial projects yet the firm made more than $74 million in profit last year, Direkt36 reported.

Additional reporting by Direkt36 for the Mészáros Files reveals V-Híd spent lavishly on employee trips around Europe, to Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, and to Tajikistan’s picturesque Pamir Mountains, a popular destination for hunters. Its foreign travel spending topped $3.5 million in recent years, despite operating predominantly in Hungary, Direkt36 found. The records also show that a trust managing assets for Mészáros firms owned two private jets frequently used by the billionaire.

“It’s a vicious cycle,” executive director of Transparency International Hungary József Péter Martin told Direkt36. “Mészáros’s company wins the public procurement contract and gets rich as a result. He uses that money to fund a private company that works to keep Fidesz in power by spreading propaganda.”

Orbán’s tight control of the press was a central pillar of his regime as he turned public broadcasters into propaganda machines and folded favorable private media into a conglomerate controlled by wealthy Fidesz loyalists.

That media empire began to crumble following Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s landslide victory in Hungary’s April elections.

Megafon pledged to keep operating but shut down its website in August after mass layoffs. In a recent public appearance, one prominent staffer described the closure as “inevitable.”