Orban Ally Offers to Hand Media Empire to Hungary After Election
Election billboards featuring Viktor Orban, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Peter Magyar, in Budapest, on April 10.
Photographer: Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty ImagesOne of Hungary’s most powerful media executives offered to hand his business to the state for free, the latest sign of the shift among some of the country’s richest following Viktor Orban‘s landslide election defeat.
Gyula Balasy, whose companies received hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government advertisement contracts over the years, presented in an online interview what he said was a notarized statement giving up ownership in the firms he said were valued at about 80 billion forint ($257 million).