The Brussels arm of a Hungarian influence organization tied to the former far-right government appears to have violated Belgian transparency law, which could result in fines of tens of thousands of euros and possibly criminal charges.
The revelation comes as a far-right network of organizations supported by former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán grapples with the end of his 16-year tenure that saw millions of dollars poured into far-right causes. United States President Donald Trump’s administration looks prepared to offer some funding for this network, though the financial gap will be tough to fill.
Documents show that the Belgian organization MCC Brussels was founded by subsidiaries of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), part of the influence network built with roughly $1.5 billion in Hungarian state assets. One of the subsidiaries exercises control over major decisions MCC Brussels makes. MCC wholly controls that subsidiary, according to Hungarian records.
These documents included Belgian notarial deeds, Hungarian company registry filings, decisions of the Budapest Metropolitan Court, and documents from Belgium’s Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) register.
The UBO register is a government database where every entity registered in Belgium must declare the natural persons or organizations who ultimately own, control, or benefit from the entity’s existence. The register is part of the European Union’s anti-money-laundering framework.
MCC Brussels did not name representatives from MCC or its subsidiary. This omission “constitutes a potential violation of corporate and association legislation and anti-money laundering legislation,” Michel Maus, tax lawyer and fraud law professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussels, said in an interview.
“This carries administrative sanctions in the form of a fine ranging from 400 euros to 40,000 euros, but there are also criminal sanctions if there is malicious intent,” Maus explained.
MCC Brussels launched in 2022. Since then, it has organized EU policy debates, courted farmers’ protest leaders, hosted climate-science skeptics, and lobbied at the EU parliament. Its critics called it an outpost of the Hungarian MCC. MCC Brussels has maintained its independence from its Hungarian namesake. The watchdog European Union Transparency Registry determined it was not independent in June, limiting some of MCC Brussels’s ability to lobby EU parliamentarians.
MCC Brussels is registered as an international non-profit association (or AISBL, per its Belgian abbreviation). Its founding deed, enacted in August 2023, names a Hungarian limited company as its founder: Gerhardus Talentum Ingatlanfejlesztő Kft.
The statutes name Gerhardus, which is a real estate corporation, as MCC Brussels’s founder and give it structural control. At least half of the board must be appointed from a list proposed by Gerhardus, and any act binding the association outside day-to-day management requires two administrators acting jointly — one of whom must be a Gerhardus nominee. The first Gerhardus-nominated administrator was Péter Lánczi, MCC Hungary’s deputy director general for professional and international affairs. Anikó Juhász, MCC Hungary’s former operations director, was the other, non-Gerhardus administrator.
Gerhardus’s founding deed, obtained from the Hungarian company registry, shows the Mathias Corvinus Collegium Alapítvány, the Hungarian MCC, wholly owns the organization. Gerhardus’s sole managing director, Pál Valentinyi, is listed as MCC’s Deputy Director General for Corporate and Real Estate Affairs.
The Budapest foundation is the sole owner of Gerhardus. Gerhardus is the founder of MCC Brussels, with nomination rights over half the board and a mandatory co-signature on every binding act. Pelso Talentum Kft, the second Hungarian company named in the Brussels founding deed, is likewise wholly owned by the foundation. No founding organization of MCC Brussels is independent of MCC in Hungary.
But MCC Brussels’s UBO documents, obtained through an information request, show only Lánczi, Juhász, and the organization’s students.
Valentinyi should have been named as Gerhardus’s managing director, and likely Balázs Orbán (no relation to Hungary’s former prime minister) should have been named as head of the Hungarian MCC. Under Belgian law, an organization or business cannot be named as a UBO for AISBLs, only natural persons.
John O’Brien, MCC Brussels’s head of communications, did not respond to Inkstick’s request for comment.
Orbán and his Fidesz party cultivated a massive influence network through state-sponsored think tanks and foundations like The Danube Institute, the Center for Fundamental Rights, and MCC. These organizations paid lavish salaries and fees to ideologically aligned figures with public funds.
In some cases, the contracts explicitly stated these arrangements were meant to influence the US political right.
Orbán’s government faced frequent criticism over its anti-LGBTQ, anti-democratic, and anti-immigrant policies. As years went on, it also faced routine accusations of corruption.
Current Prime Minister Péter Magyar defeated Orbán in April polls, running on a platform to end corruption.
Since then, Magyar’s government has taken steps to end Hungarian state support for these organizations. MCC will cease to exist as a government-funded entity on July 31, by the order of Deputy Prime Minister Bálint Ruff. Ruff has been appointed head of MCC Hungary and has the authority to dissolve the organization.
MCC and other organizations that formed the Fidesz influence network may still continue to operate as entirely private entities, though not as mouthpieces for Fidesz, according to Bulcsú Hunyadi, Head of Programmes and Radicalisation and Extremism at Political Capital, a Budapest-based think tank.
“These organizations are positioning themselves as independent think tanks,” Hunyadi explained. “They claim to be ideologically and organizationally autonomous from the previous government.”
Fidesz has lost credibility in Hungary after Orbán’s defeat, Hunyadi said. Former Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó resigned from the Hungarian parliament as a member of Fidesz on July 15 to take a position with Chinese carmaker BYD. Szijjártó was a powerful figure in the Fidesz apparatus.
Still, MCC and similar organizations’ support for far-right nationalist movements is likely to continue, even if in a limited fashion, Hunyadi explained. “Supporting the European sovereigntist movement and the US MAGA movement may be a way to channel support and legitimacy back to Hungarian Fidesz,” Hunyadi said.
Alberto Alemanno, professor of European Union Law at HEC in Paris, agreed. “Their transnational network is quite big. Interesting enough, they are the ones who took the initiative to create the network by financing it, and now that they are in need, well, they can knock the door and ask to return the favor back.”
Alemanno pointed to the the US government’s extension of financial support to organizations like MCC Brussels. The Financial Times recently reported on that the US State Department has posted grant applications worth $1–3 million each — up to roughly $5 million total, split among two or three recipients — for European civil-society groups, NGOs, educational institutions, and for-profit organizations aligned with MAGA politics.
The stated aim is to fund work on “national sovereignty, migration, censorship, and lawfare,” framed around a shared “western civilizational heritage.”
Earlier this month, O’Brien told Politico that MCC Hungary’s closure will impact his organization, but they “are pursuing a number of options for future funding and, as we have stated a number of times, this is far from the end of our organization and its intellectual project.”
Still, the potential US funding constitutes a small amount when compared to the funding of the previous Hungarian government. MCC Brussels alone received more than 6 million euros in 2024 (more than $6.4 million at the time), with the overwhelming majority coming from MCC.
Hunyadi said he was “skeptical that they will be able to make up for the enormous sums these organizations received from the Hungarian state under Viktor Orbán’s government,” concluding: “I expect these organizations and their activities to shrink.”
The dissolution order for MCC says the Hungarian Ministry of Transportation and Investment will effectively assume control of Gerhardus and Pelso, the two MCC subsidiaries on MCC Brussels’s founding documents. At publication time, neither that ministry nor the Hungarian prime minister’s office had responded to request for comment.
This article was produced as a collaboration between Inkstick, the UK-based Hope not hate, Belgian outlet De Morgen, and Hungarian outlet Átlátszó.
