In an unexpected move, the government itself is demonstrating how the assets worth more than HUF 1,600 billion, transferred into asset management foundations before the last parliamentary election, can potentially be reclaimed from public foundations led by Fidesz-affiliated trustees — even though the vast majority of the legal community believed that the outsourced state property was practically “lost forever” to the public.

The mechanism works as follows:

the government creates yet another asset management foundation, which is formed through a spin-off or demerger from an older foundation, taking with it specific assets of the original foundation.

This solution appears in a newly drafted bill concerning the Zalazone Foundation, submitted to Parliament by Minister of Culture and Innovation Balázs Hankó. As per the bill, the existing assets can be transferred into a newly established foundation, thereby removing them from the management of the board of trustees composed of entrenched government-party delegates. The assets transferred to the new foundation could even be returned to the state. In principle, decisions about the foundation’s assets and any demergers should be made by the given foundation’s board of trustees, a detail not explicitly stated by the proposal — it only appears in the explanatory memorandum.

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