Foundation close to the prime minister’s wife gets EUR 1,6 million from state funds

The Bethlen Gábor National Fund – a state-funded program to support ethnic Hungarian communities in neighboring countries – gave close to half a billion Hungarian forints to a foundation close to PM Viktor Orban’s wife.

HUF 481,8 million (EUR 1,6 million) was given to the Roy-Chowdhury-Mikes Foundation that has its seat in a castle in Transylvania, Romania. The castle is in the town of Zabola and it operates as a luxury hotel now. The foundation is led by Roy Chowdhury Aron Gregor, the owner of the Mikes castle.

The money was given to the foundation for “real estate development and equipment.”

Roy Chowdhury Aron Gregor is Zsolna Ugron’s wife. Ugron is a good friend of Anikó Lévai, the Hungarian prime minister’s wife. Lévai visited the castle a few times and she traveled with Ugron and her relative Kata Molnár Bánffy in Transylvania – we described their relationship in detail in this story here.

At a press event introducing Ugron’s novel in Hungary in 2010, Lévai was the main speaker and she said the following: “I am very lucky to have had the opportunity to visit Zabola and see what Zsolna and her husband are doing with the support of their families. They are trying to revive an age and a world that had long disappeared. I have visited them and saw how much work they had already done and how much more work they have ahead of them.”

The Mikes family was part of the Transylvania aristorcracy. During communist times their castle was turned into a hospital. After the end of the Ceaușescu regime, the family got the castle back.

The Roy-Chowdhury-Mikes Foundation has been a small organization until now. Last year its income was only HUF 2 million (EUR 6,600).

Foundations and organizations set up by aristocrats with close ties to Anikó Lévai had been given Hungarian state funding before, and Atlatszo covered those stories. But that support was much smaller, they were only given tens of millions of Hungarian forints – not half a billion.

Written by Antónia Rádi
You can read the original story in Hungarian here.

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