In one Hungarian municipality, a company has bid on 556 public procurement contracts and won them all

Corruption Research Centre Budapest (CRCB) which has so far processed data on nearly 300,000 public procurement procedures in Hungary, has published new charts and tables. These include data on some Fidesz-led municipalities where the same three companies almost always win, 444.hu reports.

Although the specific players are not named, one company, for example, has competed in 556 public tenders organised by the city and won all of them, another has won 598 tenders and lost only 7 times, and a third has won 297 tenders and lost twice.

According to the findings of the research, without an identifiable political connection, a bidder in Hungary has a 0.52 probability of winning a public procurement. The paper points out that Lőrinc Mészáros and his interests are winning more and more often, but a little less than before, and that 2016 was a particularly interesting year, as the proportion of single-player tenders fell and the proportion of multiple-player tenders spiked. This was the year when Lajos Simicska and Viktor Orbán had a full scale falling out," the paper notes.

We have repeatedly written about corruption being a major problem in Hungary, not only because according to Transparency International's latest report, Hungary is the most corrupt country in the EU, but also because the subject is a major element of the European Commission's conditionality procedure, which led to the establishment of the Integrity Authority in December, whose president spoke with Telex in detail about the work ahead of his office.