After private plane ride, Orbán meets up Lőrinc Mészáros on Croatian vacation island

A week ago, we confirmed Viktor Orbán’s tripe using a private plane tied to an oligarch. According to a source, Orbán was then sighted at the Croatian vacation spot, the island of Brač with Hungary’s richest man, Lőrinc Mészáros, whose luxury yacht was also at the Adriatic at the time.

“God, luck, and Viktor Orbán certainly played a role in getting me this far,” Lőrinc Mészáros said back in 2017. In an interview with Index last year, he added that their relationship was “a friendship based on trust,” but they had gone their separate ways, and that he owed his professional success to decades of work. At the same time, he acknowledged that he maintained contact with Orbán.

“We both work a lot, but our relationship is still relatively intense. We could talk for days about sports, football, our “common child”, the Puskás Academy. Of course, family and children are also topics, politics are also discussed, we try to have lunch together when we have time. It’s not easy to get it together, because I have a lot of things to do, and he has even more,” said Mészáros.

According to a report, the country’s richest man, who made a fortune from public procurement projects during Orbán’s administrations, managed to arrange a meeting with the prime minister again at the end of August. And last week, during Viktor Orbán’s vacation in Croatia, in a secluded village on the island of Brač, Bobovišća na Moru.

Strange encounter

According to Balázs Dénes, the head of the civil liberties union for Europe (Liberties), he ran into the pair during his own vacation in Brač. He talked about this in the September 2 broadcast of Tilos Rádió’s morning show, and confirmed the story in detail to Átlátszó.

According to Dénes, the meeting was surreal. His boat docked in Bobovišća na Moru at lunchtime, and there he ran into the Prime Minister and Mészáros. Dénes also took pictures with them, and then they got into a conversation. However, he will not make the pictures public, because as he told us:

“I cannot afford to be in a public photo with these gentlemen.”

Dénes was previously president and executive director of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (TASZ), a legal advocacy organization, and then worked for the Open Society Foundations. Dénes has been living in Berlin since 2017, as he told the prime minister, “not independently of the establishment of the Orbán regime.” He is currently the head of the Berlin-based civil rights organization Civil Liberties Union for Europe (Liberties).

The government media has been attacking Balázs Dénes for many years as a “crony of George Soros,” and by claiming that he conspired with Brussels or the German government to put political pressure on Hungary.

According to Dénes, when the prime minister found out that his interlocutor was “not a fan, to put it mildly”, he handled the situation very casually. Dénes also indicated that Mészáros did not arrive on the island on a luxury yacht, and that the oligarch and Orbán did not travel together, but they met up in the island.

Luxury yachts and a private plane

Átlátszó reported on August 23 that Viktor Orbán was vacationing in Croatia again this year, accompanied by communications specialist Fanni Kaminski, the administrator of the prime minister’s Facebook page, Balázs Orbán, the prime minister’s political director, and János Máté, the prime minister’s press secretary.

The group was photographed by Átlátszó as they boarded a private plane owned by Mária Schmidt on August 21.

Mária Schmidt is an oligarch on her own right, managing a fortune of over 60 billion HUFs  (150 million EUR), and family assets including  a mansion at the Adriatic coast where Orbán has vacationed previously. In public life, Schmidt controls a large network of educational and research institutions that recieve billions in public funding.

The next day (August 22), Péter Magyar (TISZA Party) posted photos of Viktor Orbán on a Croatian sailboat called Hot Stuff. Then, on the morning of August 25, Zsolt Németh, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Assembly, posted photos of the prime minister on Facebook, taken at a restaurant called Aerodrom Gostionica on the island of Vis.

We also reported that at the time, several luxury yachts owned by oligarchcs close to the governments were at the Adriatic this summer: the Lady MRD, owned by the construction magnate László Szíjj docked in Dubrovnik on the evening of August 27. Seagull MRD, also owned by Szíjj, has stopped at the island of Hvar at the same time, and the Rose d’Or, the yacht tied to Lőrinc Mészáros, docked in Tivat, Montenegro.

Since only Lőrinc Mészáros and his family have been photographed on board the latter so far, we assumed that they were most likely on the luxury yacht again this time.

We contacted the Prime Minister’s Office to find out whether the meeting between Orbán and Mészáros described by Dénes had actually taken place. If so, what was the purpose of the meeting, and why did Prime Minister Viktor Orbán meet with the Felcsút entrepreneur, whose companies have won countless public procurement contracts, at that particular location? We also asked what they talked about and whether Viktor Orbán had met with Lőrinc Mészáros secretly in Croatia on other occasions. We asked the same questions to the Mészáros Group’s press officer. We did not receive any answers to our questions by the time our article was published.