V-Híd leak itemises a French château stay, private jets and a €600,000 yacht at Mészáros’s railway builder
Confidential records obtained by Direkt36 list a four-day retreat costing €158,773, over €3.3m of foreign travel and aircraft bought through a trust, at a firm that earns heavily from Hungarian public contracts.
By
Katharina Brenner
In brief
- Internal V-Híd documents obtained by Direkt36 list a four-day France retreat, flights to several countries and a rented yacht.
- The records do not say who took part in the France trip, and no wrongdoing is established in them.
- V-Híd says it is not state-owned and treats the information as business secrets.
The railway builder V-Híd, owned by billionaire Lőrinc Mészáros, sent nine employees on a private jet to southwestern France in May 2024. Confidential internal documents obtained by the investigative outlet Direkt36 describe the trip and a wider pattern of spending. The second part of its “Mészáros Files” series, published in English by Telex English, sets that spending against the company’s reliance on public contracts in Hungary.
A four-day retreat in southwestern France
The employees flew for a team-building event and stayed at Château de Clotte, an estate about an hour from Bordeaux, in a village with under 300 residents. The property was bought by László Kalocsai, described as Mészáros’s winemaker and business partner, who later opened a four-star hotel there.
The event cost V-Híd €158,773 gross. The group occupied nine apartments, each costing more than €555 per person per night. Guests were offered massages, rides in vintage cars and a boat excursion on the Arcachon bay. The bill also carried €461 for cigars and €3,717 for unlimited drinks.
Foreign trips and private flights
The France jet was rented from Avcon Jet, an Austrian firm specialising in private jets. The documents also show trips to Dubai, the French Riviera and Tajikistan charged to the company, and a yacht rented in Cannes at an additional €600,000. Across the years covered by the records, foreign travel cost the company over 3.3 million euros, even though most of V-Híd’s work at the time was in Hungary.
| Period | Trip | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | London, Pisa and Nice | €83,200 in total |
| February 2024 | Tajikistan, four people aboard | €46,200 |
| April 2024 | Two trips to the United Arab Emirates | €94,000 in total |
| 2024 | Eight foreign trips by private flight | Over €200,000 |
According to HVG, Mészáros joined a hunt in Tajikistan’s Pamir range in 2024, though nothing shows whether the February flight was linked to it.
Aircraft held by a trust
A trust arrangement lets a trustee manage transferred assets for designated beneficiaries, and it can make the original owner less visible to the public. According to the documents, AGBVK Bizalmi Vagyonkezelő Zrt. acts as trustee for assets of Mészáros’s companies, and those assets funded the purchase of aircraft.
A document dated 20 June 2025 and addressed to four Mészáros companies states that the trustee paid 19.1 billion forints, roughly 50 million euros, for the aircraft registered OE-LOT. It followed OE-LEM, also bought from those assets, which Viktor Orbán used to travel to Bulgaria in 2018 for a Videoton match. In November 2023, V-Híd contracted to rent OE-LEM for 85 flight hours at 850,000 euros, so one Mészáros company rented a plane bought with assets of others in the group.
A helicopter registered OE-XWY was acquired by the trust using assets of Mészáros’s companies and of Duna Aszfalt, owned by László Szíjj, whose companies also won numerous high-value public contracts under Orbán.
Profits, dividends and public contracts
V-Híd is among the most profitable companies in the Mészáros empire. Last year its after-tax profit reached about 65.9 million euros, and Mészáros received close to 25.14 million euros in dividends. Transparency International Hungary data place it among the firms with the most public procurement wins over a three-year span. It won the Southern Ring Railway tender and is a subcontractor on the Hungarian section of the Budapest-Belgrade line and on the M1 motorway expansion.
Large sums also went on domestic events, including one hosted by Anita Köböl, now spokesperson for the Tisza Party government, which defeated Orbán’s party in the April parliamentary elections. The first part of the series showed V-Híd providing large sums to Megafon, which supported Fidesz campaigns.
József Péter Martin, who heads Transparency International Hungary, told Direkt36 that yacht and helicopter trips reveal an unfair procurement system, since a fair one would leave no room for such spending, and he described that system as “a breeding ground for corruption”. That is his assessment of the system, not a finding about V-Híd.
The company’s reply and the limits of the records
Direkt36 sent V-Híd detailed questions, but the company gave no substantive answers. It stressed that it is not state-owned, said the information constitutes business secrets and said it does not consent to its publication. The records do not show precisely who went on the France trip, and they establish no illegality by V-Híd. Telex English, relaying Direkt36, is the only publisher behind these details, and the documents have not been independently confirmed.
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