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.
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