Hungarian Foreign Ministry spends EUR 1.5 million to refurnish Moscow center

The Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs already spent EUR 21.5 million to renovate the Moscow center of the Liszt Institute, but the costs did not stop here.  Now the Ministry is allocating EUR 1.5 million for furniture and interior decoration of the Moscow center.

The flagship of Hungary’s cultural diplomacy, the state-backed Liszt Institute’s center is located on 21 Povarskaya Street, one of the most prestigious streets in the city center of Moscow. Although the plot is owned by the Russian state, the building has been used by the Hungarian diplomatic services since 1935. During the Cold War, the building housed the Hungarian Embassy, and later, the Trade Representation, and finally in 1999 it became the home of the Hungarian Cultural Institute, which has rebranded as Liszt Institute in 2021.

The renovation of the Moscow building began a year before that, in 2020. The project was impacted by cost overruns. According to Átlátszó’s sources, by 2023,

the renovation already cost HUF 8.4 billion (EUR 21.5 million), a significant increase from the originally planned 6 billion.

The renovation did not include refurnishing, which is evidently also needed, so the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has announced a tender for interior work and procurement.

The public tender for the original reconstruction included only one bidder which promptly won the contract. The company in question, Mega-Logistic Zrt. has caught our attention before due to their series of successes in tenders announced by the Foreign Ministry: in 2011, they were one of the five companies tasked with renovating embassies abroad for a total of HUF 1.2 billion (EUR 4.56 at the exchange rate at the time). In 2018, they were awarded 3.8 billion HUF (EUR 12 million) to renovate the Hungarian embassy in Washington, and in the next year, Mega-Logistic alone won the tender to renovate 15 other embassies.

Unsurprising win

The company’s success story continued despite the fact that in 2013, the company’s owner at the time, Géza Lóki was sentenced for document forgery. The company, which continues to be owned by the Lóki family, and it has been a favorite of governments even before 2010, when Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz took over. Under the previous Socialist governments, they were regularly contracted by the Ministry of Defense and the national energy company MVM.

Although Mega-Logistic was not the only bidder for the Moscow center’s interior decoration, Mega-Logistic beat their competition with a EUR 620 million (EUR 1.5 million) bid. They and their subcontractors will be responsible for delivering hundreds of chairs, seating furniture, tables, storage furniture, beds, couches, carpets, curtains and other equipment (including coat racks, mirrors, umbrella racks, pedestals, display cases, counters and picture frames).

According to the tender document, only companies that employ at least one specialist with Russian language who can participate in on-site assembly. When evaluating the applications, companies that submitted suitable and valid applications were ranked based on the total value of their specified and completed references in buildings under diplomatic protection.