Companies linked to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán have dramatically increased their share of uncontested public tenders, with 69 percent of their contracts in 2024-25 awarded in processes where no other firms submitted bids. The figure was 45 percent between 2010 and 2023, according to an FT investigation - while the national average for all Hungarian companies has held steady at around 29 percent.

The surge has come despite Hungary's pledges to Brussels to tackle the single-bid problem, "Hvylya" reports, citing the Financial Times analysis of nearly 350,000 procurement contracts. The European Commission had specifically targeted single-bid tenders as a key corruption indicator when it began freezing funds to Hungary in 2022.

"One interpretation is they are in a sort of panic, with these people on a last-minute public-funds feeding frenzy. I think they expect they may lose the elections," said Istvan Janos Toth, director of the Corruption Research Center Budapest and an economist at the SGH Warsaw School of Economics.

The politically connected companies were about one-third more likely to win uncontested tenders than their peers, even after accounting for differences across sectors, the FT found. Among the examples: Lorinc Meszaros's company Euro General was a joint winner of a single-bid contract to build a 55 million euro water theme park in 2020. A year earlier, another Meszaros company was part of a group that won a 49 million euro uncontested contract for gas infrastructure.

"It's difficult to speak about corruption, which has a strict definition in the criminal code, but the statistics indicate a distortion or anomaly of competition procedures," said an expert at Olaf, the EU's anti-fraud authority. "In the construction sector, certain companies are very dominant. That is not logical because you don't really need local knowledge for construction."

The opposition has seized on the corruption issue ahead of next month's election, with polls showing Orbán's 16-year hold on power now under serious threat. About 18 billion euros in EU funds remain frozen over concerns about fraudulent tender processes.

Previously: Hungary Opposition Leader Accuses Orbán of Inviting Russian Spies to Meddle in Elections.