Chapter XLIII: Az állami vagyonnal kapcsolatos bevételek és kiadások (Revenues and Expenditures Relating to State Assets)

Overview

Chapter XLIII is the budget container for the Hungarian state’s role as owner of property and enterprises. It records what the state earns from the assets it holds — rents, dividends, concession fees, proceeds of sales — and what it spends maintaining, capitalising, and administering them. Total expenditure is 174,620.8 millió Ft; total revenue 142,451.5 millió Ft; the chapter runs a deficit of 32,169.3 millió Ft.

Three ownership-rights holders structure the chapter: MNV Zrt. (Magyar Nemzeti Vagyonkezelő Zrt. — Hungarian National Asset Management Ltd.), which manages the property portfolio “entrusted” to it; the NGM (Nemzetgazdasági Minisztérium — Ministry of National Economy), which exercises ownership rights over a separate set of companies; the Magyar Turisztikai Ügynökség Zrt. (Hungarian Tourism Agency Ltd.); and the Nemzeti Tőkeholding Zrt. (National Capital Holding Ltd.), the umbrella that consolidated the state’s venture-capital funds from January 2023.

The chapter is not an agency budget in the ordinary sense. It is the ledger of the state acting as an investor and landlord — and that is precisely what makes it analytically interesting. Every line here asks the same question in a different form: does the Hungarian state need to own this, capitalise this, or hold this, and what is the price the taxpayer pays for the answer being “yes” by default?

The biggest single number in the chapter is on the revenue side: 94,805.2 millió Ft of dividend income from companies under NGM ownership. The state’s portfolio is not idle; it earns. But the chapter as a whole still loses money, because the felhalmozási (capital) side spends 87,316.8 millió Ft against 6,176.0 millió Ft of capital revenue — the state is putting fresh equity into its companies and capital funds faster than the portfolio returns capital to it.

Expenditure Analysis

Ingó- és ingatlan vagyonelemek fenntartása és őrzése (Maintenance and guarding of movable and immovable property assets)

• Current allocation: 14,000.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line maintains and physically secures the property the state actually owns. Whatever one concludes about whether the state should own a given building, while it owns the building it must keep the roof on it and the doors locked — an unmaintained asset loses value, and value lost is taxpayer wealth destroyed. This is the irreducible custodial cost of the existing portfolio. The honest reform is not to stop maintaining state property; it is to shrink the portfolio (see the sales-revenue discussion below and the bérleti díjak line), at which point this line falls naturally because there is less to maintain. Classified Keep on the current portfolio, with the explicit note that its correct long-run size is a function of how much property the state divests.
• Transition mechanism: No change in 2026. Reductions follow portfolio shrinkage, not a direct cut to maintenance.
• Affected groups: None directly; the taxpayer benefits from asset value preserved rather than dissipated through neglect.

Központi költségvetési szervek elhelyezésével kapcsolatos bérleti díjak (Rents for housing central government bodies)

• Current allocation: 28,871.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This is rent the central state pays to house its own offices. It is a real operating cost of government and cannot be abolished — ministries and agencies must be located somewhere. It is classified Keep because the function (premises for the apparatus) is genuine, but it carries a sharp efficiency observation rather than a phase-out. The state simultaneously owns a large property portfolio (the maintenance line above) and pays 28,871.0 millió Ft in rent to house its bodies. Some of that rent is paid into the private market; some is an internal transfer where one arm of the state rents from another, which is accounting circulation rather than economic cost. A genuine reform would consolidate the occupied-space footprint as the apparatus itself shrinks under the reform programme: fewer agencies and a smaller headcount mean less floor area, and this line should fall in step. The cut here is a second-order consequence of cutting the bodies, not a first-order decision about rent.
• Transition mechanism: Hold nominal in 2026. As reform reduces the number and size of central bodies across other chapters, the occupied footprint contracts and this line declines without a dedicated decision.
• Affected groups: None adverse; landlords lose tenancy income only as the state genuinely needs less space.

A Nemzeti Filmintézet Közhasznú Nonprofit Zrt. támogatása (Support for the National Film Institute Non-profit Ltd.)

• Current allocation: 11,800.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)
• Rationale: This is a direct operating transfer to the Nemzeti Filmintézet (National Film Institute, NFI), the body that administers Hungary’s film-support architecture. It is separate from, and additional to, the indirect tax-rebate scheme: the indirect system’s deposit account (letéti számla) was set at 70 milliárd Ft for 2026, down from 81 milliárd Ft in 2025, and funds the 30% rebate on direct Hungarian production costs.¹ The 11,800.0 millió Ft here is the institutional subsidy that keeps the Institute itself running and finances its direct production grants. Film production is a commercial activity. It has a price, a market, paying audiences, private investors, and — through the rebate scheme — an existing voluntary-finance channel where producers raise money against expected returns. A subsidy of this kind funds a particular cohort of producers whose projects clear the Institute’s selection process; the decision about which films get made is a subjective allocation of resources by an administrative body, made without the price signal that paying audiences would provide. The classical-liberal reading is straightforward: where a market exists and a voluntary-finance channel already operates, the case for an additional involuntary transfer is weak. The question is not whether Hungarians value film — many do, and reveal it by buying tickets and subscriptions — but whether the optimal slate of Hungarian films can be determined by a state selection panel rather than by audiences spending their own money. It cannot; no panel can aggregate the dispersed preferences of viewers without the transactions that reveal them.
• Transition mechanism: A 3-year phase-out, linear, of the institutional subsidy. The protected parties are productions with grants already awarded and contractually committed: the Institute has stated that films already granted state support will receive it.² A 3-year glide honours in-flight production commitments — film projects run multi-year from greenlight to delivery — while closing the window on new institutional grant cycles. The 30% rebate scheme (a separate budget mechanism, not in this line) is a distinct policy question; this classification addresses only the 11,800.0 millió Ft direct institutional transfer. Year 1 saves 3,933.3 millió Ft, rising to the full 11,800.0 millió Ft from year 3.
• Affected groups: Hungarian film producers dependent on direct NFI grants rather than the rebate scheme or private finance; the Institute’s own staff. The protected interest is the in-flight production pipeline, which the linear glide preserves. Producers with bankable projects retain the 30% rebate channel and private investment; the displaced activity is the marginal project that could attract neither.

A vagyongazdálkodás egyéb kiadásai — Az állam tulajdonosi felelősségével kapcsolatos környezetvédelmi feladatok finanszírozása (Financing of environmental tasks relating to the state’s ownership responsibility)

• Current allocation: 9,000.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line funds environmental remediation that the state owes as the owner of contaminated or environmentally hazardous property — legacy industrial sites, former state enterprises whose liabilities passed to the state, land where the state is the responsible owner. This is not discretionary green spending; it is the discharge of a liability the state already carries. An owner who has caused or inherited contamination owes remediation to the parties harmed by it — neighbouring landowners, groundwater users, future occupants. That is a rights-protection obligation: the harm is involuntary, often irreversible, and falls on identifiable parties who did not consent to it. Refusing to fund it would not abolish the liability; it would shift an uncompensated harm onto third parties. Classified Keep as the honouring of an existing ownership liability, with the standard operating-efficiency caveat that remediation should be competitively tendered.
• Transition mechanism: No change. As state property is divested, remediation liabilities transfer with the assets or are settled at sale, and the residual obligation shrinks.
• Affected groups: None adverse; parties exposed to contamination from state-owned land are the protected interest.

Az MNV Zrt. működésének támogatása (Support for the operation of MNV Zrt.)

• Current allocation: 10,000.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (4 years)
• Rationale: This is the operating subsidy for MNV Zrt. itself — the apparatus that manages the “entrusted” property portfolio. MNV is a company with 300-499 employees.³ Its existence is a function of the size of the state’s property holdings: the larger the portfolio the state insists on owning, the larger the administrative body needed to manage it. This inverts the usual framing. MNV is not a service the taxpayer buys; it is the overhead cost of the state choosing to be a major landlord and asset-holder rather than divesting. The classical-liberal reform is not to abolish asset management while keeping the assets — someone must hold the keys — but to shrink both together: a divestment programme that sells the non-strategic portfolio reduces the management burden proportionally, and a smaller residual portfolio of genuinely strategic holdings can be managed by a correspondingly smaller body. The 10,000.0 millió Ft operating subsidy should fall on the same schedule as the portfolio shrinks, because the apparatus is sized to the portfolio. It is classified Phase-Out rather than Keep because the management mandate at its current scale exists only to administer a portfolio that the reform programme reduces; the apparatus is not a permanent rights-protection function.
• Transition mechanism: A 4-year phase-out, severance-with-overlap. MNV’s costs are predominantly payroll for an administrative workforce of 300-499 employees³ with general, transferable office and asset-management skills — exactly the case the severance-with-overlap mechanism fits. The payroll component of the 10,000.0 millió Ft operating subsidy is estimated at 6,000.0 millió Ft (60% — a standard share for an administrative body whose output is professional services, consistent with the operating- cost structure typical of asset-management companies).⁴ Under a 24-month severance-with-overlap, the payroll component is honoured for years 1-2 while the workforce transitions; non-payroll operating costs of 4,000.0 millió Ft are released immediately. Years 1-2 net saving: 4,000.0 millió Ft. Year 3 onward, once severance ends and a residual strategic-portfolio management function is funded from portfolio dividends rather than budget subsidy: full 10,000.0 millió Ft. The 4-year horizon allows the divestment programme that shrinks the portfolio to run in parallel.
• Affected groups: MNV’s 300-499 employees. Under severance-with-overlap they retain full state salary for 24 months and may take private-sector employment in that window while keeping both incomes; their skills — property management, corporate administration, real-estate transactions — transfer directly to a large private real-estate and corporate-services market. A residual strategic-asset-management function retains a fraction of the staff.

Egyéb vagyonkezelési kiadások (Other asset-management expenditures)

• Current allocation: 8,000.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)
• Rationale: An undifferentiated “other” asset-management line of 8,000.0 millió Ft. A budget category labelled only “egyéb” (other) is, by construction, spending the budget document does not specify — and unspecified discretionary allocation inside a state asset-management chapter is exactly where the analytical frame presses hardest. Without a stated purpose, the line cannot be shown to fund a rights-protection function, a constitutional precondition, or a response to irreversible harm. The burden of demonstrating necessity sits with the line, and a residual catch-all cannot discharge it. Some portion is genuine residual transaction cost attached to portfolio operations; that portion would survive itemisation and reallocation to the specific lines it belongs to. The classification is Phase-Out rather than Immediate Cut to allow one budget cycle for the genuine residual operating costs hidden inside the aggregate to be identified and migrated to named lines.
• Transition mechanism: A 3-year linear phase-out. During the transition, the Treasury itemises the line; demonstrably necessary transaction costs are moved to specific named lines (which then carry their own classification), and the unspecified remainder reaches zero. Year 1 saves 2,666.7 millió Ft.
• Affected groups: None identifiable, which is itself the point — an unspecified line protects no nameable party. Genuine operating costs hidden inside it are preserved by reallocation, not by the aggregate.

Az államot korábbi tulajdonosi döntéseihez kapcsolódóan terhelő egyéb kiadások (Other expenditures burdening the state from earlier ownership decisions)

• Current allocation: 700.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line settles obligations arising from the state’s past decisions as an owner — guarantees called, contractual liabilities crystallising, settlements owed to counterparties of earlier state transactions. These are liabilities already incurred; the budget line is the discharge of a debt, and the state is bound to honour contracts it entered in good faith with private counterparties. Refusing payment would be a rights-violation against those counterparties. Classified Keep as the honouring of existing contractual obligations.
• Transition mechanism: No change. The line is finite and falls as legacy obligations are settled.
• Affected groups: None adverse; counterparties owed under earlier state transactions are the protected interest.

Állami örökléssel kapcsolatos kiadások elszámolása (Settlement of expenditures relating to state inheritance)

• Current allocation: 2,820.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: When a person dies without heirs in Hungary, the estate passes to the state (állami öröklés — escheat). This line funds the costs the state incurs administering, valuing, and settling those estates — and the chapter’s revenue side shows the matching 2,484.0 millió Ft of operational and 276.0 millió Ft of capital proceeds from estates the state then realises. Escheat is a genuine residual function of the legal system: property must have a legal owner, and where no private heir exists the state’s role as default successor avoids ownerless assets falling out of the legal order entirely. The administrative cost of executing it is a real cost of that rights-and-property-order function. Classified Keep with the operating-efficiency caveat; it is essentially self-financing against the matching revenue line.
• Transition mechanism: No change. The line scales with the flow of heirless estates, not with policy.
• Affected groups: None; this is the administration of a rule-of-property function.

ÁFA elszámolás (VAT settlement)

• Current allocation: 1,000.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: A technical line settling VAT arising on the chapter’s property transactions (sales, rentals, purchases). It is an accounting pass-through, not a discretionary programme — the state, transacting in property, incurs and reclaims VAT like any other market participant. Classified Keep as a mechanical tax- accounting line; it falls automatically as the volume of state property transactions falls under the divestment programme.
• Transition mechanism: No change; scales mechanically with transaction volume.
• Affected groups: None.

Ingatlan beruházások, ingatlan és egyéb eszközök vásárlása (Property investments, purchase of property and other assets)

• Current allocation: 3,900.0 millió Ft (3,887.0 capital + 13.0 operating)
• Classification: Phase-Out (2 years)
• Rationale: This line funds the state buying property and other assets — that is, the state expanding its portfolio. The analytical direction of the reform programme is portfolio reduction: divest the non-strategic holdings, shrink the management apparatus, return capital to taxpayers. Fresh acquisition spending runs against that direction. The chapter already shows the state is a substantial property seller — 18,500.0 millió Ft of budgeted ingatlan-értékesítés revenue — so the portfolio is being actively traded; this line is the buy side of that trading book. There can be a narrow genuine case for acquisition (consolidating a holding, acquiring a parcel needed to make a divestment block saleable), but acquisition at scale, in a chapter whose reform logic is divestment, is not a default Keep. Classified Phase-Out over 2 years to allow in-flight purchase commitments to complete while ending new state-portfolio expansion.
• Transition mechanism: A 2-year linear phase-out. Purchase contracts already signed are honoured; new acquisition is halted except where it is instrumentally necessary to execute a divestment (assembling a saleable block), which is a transaction cost of selling rather than portfolio growth. Year 1 saves 1,950.0 millió Ft.
• Affected groups: Counterparties of in-flight purchase contracts are protected by the 2-year run-off; no party relies on the state continuing to acquire new property.

Az MNV Zrt. tulajdonosi joggyakorlásába tartozó társaságok forrásjuttatásai (Resource allocations to companies under MNV ownership)

• Current allocation: 604.8 millió Ft (550.0 operating + 54.8 capital)
• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)
• Rationale: Budget transfers to companies the state owns through MNV. A state-owned company that needs an annual budget transfer to operate is, by that fact, not covering its costs from its own revenues. The transfer is the visible side of the soft budget constraint — the company faces no hard consequence for running at a loss because the shortfall is met from general taxation rather than from the discipline of either profitability or insolvency. A company permanently dependent on a subsidy is one whose continued existence the market has not validated. The amounts here are small, but the principle scales: the size of a line is not a criterion for its classification. Either the company can be made to operate on a commercial basis — the New Zealand SOE Act 1986 reconstituted every government trading entity as a commercial enterprise with an independent board, a hard dividend obligation, and standard accounting, after which the SOE sector’s dividend revenue rose sharply⁵ — or, if it cannot, the activity does not have a demonstrated economic rationale and the company should be wound down or sold.
• Transition mechanism: A 3-year linear phase-out. During the transition each recipient company is moved to a commercial mandate on the New Zealand SOE model — independent board, hard budget constraint, dividend obligation — or prepared for sale or wind-down. Year 1 saves 201.6 millió Ft.
• Affected groups: Employees and managers of the recipient companies, who face the discipline of either commercial operation or ownership change; the 3-year glide gives time for the commercial conversion or the sale process.

A Magyar Turisztikai Ügynökség Zrt. tulajdonosi joggyakorlása alá tartozó gazdasági társaságok forrásjuttatásai (Resource allocations to companies under Hungarian Tourism Agency ownership)

• Current allocation: 500.0 millió Ft (capital)
• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)
• Rationale: A capital allocation to companies held under the Magyar Turisztikai Ügynökség (Hungarian Tourism Agency). Tourism is a thoroughly commercial sector: hotels, attractions, tour operators, and marketing services all have prices, paying customers, and active private markets. A state-owned company in this sector requiring a budget capital injection is operating inside that competitive market while drawing on involuntary tax finance — which both signals that the company is not self-sustaining and places its privately-owned competitors at a disadvantage they did not earn. The seen side of the transfer is the recipient company; the unseen side is the private tourism operator competing against a subsidised rival, and the taxpayer with no stake in either. Classified Phase-Out to allow the recipient company an orderly transition to commercial operation or sale.
• Transition mechanism: A 3-year linear phase-out; recipient companies are moved to a commercial mandate or sold. Year 1 saves 166.7 millió Ft.
• Affected groups: Employees of the recipient companies; private tourism operators benefit from the removal of a subsidised competitor.

Az NGM tulajdonosi joggyakorlása alá tartozó társaságok forrásjuttatásai (Resource allocations to companies under NGM ownership)

• Current allocation: 60,500.0 millió Ft (capital)

• Classification: Phase-Out (5 years)

• Rationale: This is the largest expenditure line in the chapter and the analytically heaviest: 60,500.0 millió Ft of capital injected into the portfolio of companies whose ownership rights the NGM exercises. It must be read against the matching revenue line — 94,805.2 millió Ft of dividend income from the same NGM portfolio. The portfolio earns more than this line costs. That fact cuts both ways. It means the state’s company holdings are not uniformly loss-making; some are genuinely profitable enterprises. It also means the state is recycling: it draws 94,805.2 millió Ft of dividends out of the portfolio and pushes 60,500.0 millió Ft of fresh capital back in. The reform question is not whether the portfolio earns — parts of it plainly do — but whether the state needs to own it to capture that value, and whether the capital recycling is funding genuine investment or absorbing the losses of the weaker companies in the portfolio.

  The classical-liberal reading distinguishes the two halves. A state-owned company that is genuinely profitable on a hard budget constraint is a candidate for privatisation, not subsidy: selling it returns capital to the Treasury, removes the company from the reach of political direction, and exposes it to the discipline of private ownership — and the proceeds are real, one-off revenue the reform programme can use. A state-owned company that needs the capital injection to cover operating losses is exhibiting the soft budget constraint: it survives not because it creates value but because the shortfall is met from the dividends of the profitable companies and from general taxation. Aggregating both inside a single 60,500.0 millió Ft line obscures which is which. Until the portfolio is itemised company by company, the line cannot be shown to fund anything the analytical frame recognises as a necessary state function — and 60,500.0 millió Ft is too large a discretionary capital allocation to default to Keep on the strength of the portfolio’s aggregate dividend yield.

  For a worker at the roughly 540,000 Ft median monthly gross wage, the labour-tax wedge that part-funds general expenditure of this kind is not the visible payroll deduction alone. Counting the employer-side SzocHo (13% on gross, paid before the worker ever sees the wage), the 15% SZJA and approximately 18.5% employee social-insurance contributions on the declared gross, and then the 27% ÁFA applied to a large share of what the remaining take-home buys: the gross employer cost is 113% of the declared gross; the worker’s net-of-SZJA-and-contributions take-home is roughly 66.5% of that declared gross, or 58.8% of full employer cost; and if approximately 70% of take-home income is spent on 27% ÁFA-bearing goods and services, a further 13–14 percentage points of employer cost is absorbed in consumption tax — yielding a combined all-in wedge in the 55–60% range.⁶ The 60,500.0 millió Ft on this line is drawn from that take. The 60,500.0 millió Ft on this line is drawn from that take. The wage-earner funding a capital injection into a state enterprise portfolio cannot identify which company received the money, cannot vote on it as a shareholder, and receives no dividend from it — the dividends flow back to the Treasury, not to the taxpayer whose labour funded the equity.

• Transition mechanism: A 5-year phase-out, linear. The horizon reflects the scale and heterogeneity of the portfolio: itemising dozens of companies, separating the profitable from the loss-making, and executing privatisations on terms that realise fair value rather than fire-sale prices takes several years. During the transition: (a) each company is itemised and its accounts separated from the aggregate; (b) profitable companies are prepared for sale, the proceeds returning capital to the Treasury — the New Zealand SOE programme demonstrated that commercial reconstitution before or instead of sale already raises sector dividend revenue sharply⁵, and the UK 1979-1997 privatisations show clear productivity gains where the activity is genuinely competitive, with more contested outcomes where it is a network monopoly requiring careful regulator design⁷; (c) loss-making companies are either converted to a hard budget constraint and made viable or wound down. The 60,500.0 millió Ft of annual capital injection falls to zero as the portfolio is restructured and divested. Year 1 saves 12,100.0 millió Ft.

• Affected groups: Employees and managers of the NGM-portfolio companies — a large and heterogeneous group across multiple sectors. Profitable companies passing to private ownership change employer but not viability; their workforces are not displaced. Loss-making companies face genuine adjustment, and the 5-year horizon plus company-by-company treatment is what allows that adjustment to be handled case by case rather than through a uniform shock. The taxpayer is the beneficiary: privatisation proceeds are real revenue, and ending the loss-absorption recycling stops the diversion of the profitable companies’ dividends into covering the weaker ones.

Tőkealapok feletti tulajdonosi joggyakorláshoz kapcsolódó kiadások (Expenditures relating to ownership rights over capital funds)

• Current allocation: 6,975.0 millió Ft (capital)
• Classification: Phase-Out (4 years)
• Rationale: This line, together with the Nemzeti Tőkeholding line below, funds the state acting as a venture-capital and private-equity investor through capital funds (tőkealapok). The Nemzeti Tőkeholding group was created in January 2023 to consolidate the state’s partly or wholly state-backed capital funds under one roof.⁸ The state placing equity into venture and growth-capital funds is a clear instance of the calculation problem in the domain where it bites hardest. Venture investing is the business of allocating scarce capital across competing, uncertain projects on the basis of judgements about future returns — judgements that, in a market, are disciplined by the investor’s own capital being at risk and by the price signals of competing private bids. A state capital fund allocating tax-sourced money faces neither discipline directly: the officials selecting the investments do not own the capital, and the returns (or losses) accrue to the budget rather than to them. Where the state fund crowds into deals private venture capital would also fund, it displaces private investors without adding capital to the economy; where it funds deals private capital declined, it is, by revealed preference, funding the projects the market judged not worth the risk. A private venture-capital and private-equity market operates in Hungary — Invest Europe data for 2022 recorded 39 active funds and approximately €420 million in new investment in Hungarian portfolio companies⁹ — and the case for an involuntary, tax-financed parallel allocator alongside it is weak.
• Transition mechanism: A 4-year linear phase-out. Existing fund commitments — capital already committed to portfolio companies — are honoured to term; venture commitments are multi-year and cannot be unwound without destroying value. New state capital commitments end. As existing fund positions mature or are exited, the capital returns to the Treasury rather than being recycled into new state-fund commitments. Year 1 saves 1,743.75 millió Ft.
• Affected groups: Portfolio companies holding existing state-fund commitments are protected by the run-off to term; private venture and growth-capital investors benefit from the removal of a tax-subsidised co-investor competing for the same deals.

A Nemzeti Tőkeholding Zrt. tőkealapokkal kapcsolatos tulajdonosi kiadásai (Nemzeti Tőkeholding’s ownership expenditures relating to capital funds)

• Current allocation: 9,000.0 millió Ft (capital)
• Classification: Phase-Out (4 years)
• Rationale: The companion line to the one above — capital expenditure routed specifically through the Nemzeti Tőkeholding, the consolidated state capital-fund holding established in 2023.⁸ The same analysis applies: this is the state operating as a venture and growth-capital allocator using involuntary tax finance, in a sector where a private capital market already operates and where the absence of the allocating officials’ own capital at risk removes the discipline that makes venture investing function. The 2023 consolidation rationalised the administration of the state’s capital funds; it did not change the underlying question of whether the state should be deploying taxpayer capital as venture equity at all. The new-fund structure the Holding uses requires a minimum 30% private co-investment⁸ — which is itself an admission that purely state-allocated venture capital is problematic, and which raises the question of why the remaining up-to-70% state share is needed if private investors are willing to commit alongside. Where private capital co-invests, the market is already functioning; the state tranche is crowding in on deals private investors have already validated.
• Transition mechanism: A 4-year linear phase-out, run in parallel with the line above. Existing committed positions run off to term; new state capital commitments end; returned capital flows to the Treasury. The Holding’s administrative function winds down as the funds it oversees are exited. Year 1 saves 2,250.0 millió Ft.
• Affected groups: Portfolio companies with existing commitments are protected by run-off; the private co-investors already alongside the state funds can absorb a larger share of viable deals; the Holding’s administrative staff face transition, handled within the 4-year horizon.

NGM egyéb kiadások (NGM other expenditures)

• Current allocation: 50.0 millió Ft (operating)
• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)
• Rationale: A small undifferentiated “other” line attached to the NGM ownership-rights block. As with the larger “egyéb” asset-management line, an unspecified residual category cannot be shown to fund a named necessary function. The amount is minor, but the principle is the same one applied to the 8,000.0 millió Ft line: unspecified discretionary allocation is classified for itemisation and reallocation, not defaulted to Keep.
• Transition mechanism: A 3-year linear phase-out; genuine residual costs are itemised and migrated to named lines, the remainder reaches zero. Year 1 saves 16.7 millió Ft.
• Affected groups: None identifiable.

Európai Uniós pályázatokhoz forrás biztosítása (Provision of resources for EU tenders)

• Current allocation: 5,900.0 millió Ft (capital)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line provides the national co-financing and pre-financing the state must put up to draw down EU project funds, and it matches a revenue line — 5,900.0 millió Ft of “az Európai Uniós finanszírozású projektek megelőlegezéseinek visszatérülése” (return of pre-financing on EU-financed projects). The two lines net to zero: the state advances the co-finance and recovers the pre-financed portion. While Hungary participates in EU cohesion and development programmes, the national co-financing obligation is a binding parameter of that participation — a contractual condition of funds already programmed. It is classified Keep as the honouring of in-flight programme commitments, with the standard observation that the underlying question of EU-funds participation is a policy choice made elsewhere, not in this asset-management chapter. Within this chapter the line is a near-neutral pass-through.
• Transition mechanism: No change; the line nets against its matching revenue and follows the EU programming cycle.
• Affected groups: None within the chapter’s scope.

Fejezeti tartalék (Chapter reserve)

• Current allocation: 1,000.0 millió Ft (capital)
• Classification: Nominal Freeze
• Rationale: A standard chapter-level contingency reserve. A modest reserve against in-year contingencies in the management of a large property and enterprise portfolio is a defensible budgeting practice; the amount, at 1,000.0 millió Ft against a 174,620.8 millió Ft chapter, is proportionate and not a vehicle for concealed discretionary spending. Classified Nominal Freeze: hold the nominal allocation, and real-terms erosion at typical inflation reduces its real weight over the decade. As the chapter’s overall envelope shrinks under the divestment programme, the reserve should be resized down in step at a future budget cycle.
• Transition mechanism: Hold nominal; resize down as the chapter envelope contracts.
• Affected groups: None.

Revenue Items

Chapter XLIII is revenue-rich — 142,451.5 millió Ft, against 174,620.8 millió Ft of expenditure. Most of the revenue is the return the state earns as an owner of property and companies.

• Name: Osztalékbevétel — NGM (Dividend income — NGM portfolio)

• Current yield: 94,805.2 millió Ft

• Type: Other (investment income)

• Notes: Dividends paid to the state by the companies whose ownership rights the NGM exercises. This is the single largest line in the chapter and the counterpart to the 60,500.0 millió Ft capital-injection expenditure line. It demonstrates that the state’s enterprise portfolio is not uniformly loss-making — parts of it are genuinely profitable. Under the reform programme the treatment of the profitable companies is privatisation: a sale realises the company’s value as a one-off capital receipt and removes it from political direction. The dividend stream would then cease, replaced by sale proceeds and, thereafter, by corporate tax on the privately-owned company. The dividend line is therefore not a permanent revenue base to be protected; it is the yield on a portfolio the reform programme intends to divest.

• Name: Ingatlan értékesítésből származó bevételek (Revenue from property sales)

• Current yield: 18,500.0 millió Ft

• Type: Other (asset disposal)

• Notes: Proceeds of state property sales. This line is the revenue face of portfolio divestment and would increase substantially under the reform programme — a systematic sale of the non-strategic property portfolio generates one-off receipts well above the routine 18,500.0 millió Ft budgeted here. It is not a recurring revenue base; each forint of sale revenue corresponds to an asset leaving the portfolio.

• Name: Vegyes bevételek (Miscellaneous revenue)

• Current yield: 7,673.0 millió Ft

• Type: Other

• Notes: Undifferentiated miscellaneous revenue from MNV portfolio operations. An “egyéb/vegyes” revenue aggregate, like its expenditure-side counterpart, would benefit from itemisation.

• Name: Koncessziós díjak (Concession fees)

• Current yield: 7,000.0 millió Ft

• Type: Fee

• Notes: Fees paid for concessions over state assets. These are payments for the use of state-owned rights or property; they persist as long as the underlying concessions exist. Where a concession exists because the state monopolised an activity it need not have monopolised, the concession fee is the rent on a state-constructed monopoly rather than a market price — but within this chapter the line is a routine receipt.

• Name: Az Európai Uniós finanszírozású projektek megelőlegezéseinek visszatérülése (Return of pre-financing on EU-financed projects)

• Current yield: 5,900.0 millió Ft

• Type: EU transfer

• Notes: The recovery of pre-financing the state advanced on EU projects; nets exactly against the 5,900.0 millió Ft expenditure line of the same name.

• Name: Állami örökléssel kapcsolatos értékesítési bevételek (Sales revenue from state inheritance)

• Current yield: 2,760.0 millió Ft (2,484.0 operating + 276.0 capital)

• Type: Other (asset disposal)

• Notes: Proceeds from realising heirless estates that passed to the state by escheat. Matches the 2,820.0 millió Ft expenditure line for administering those estates; the function is essentially self-financing.

• Name: Bérleti díjak (Rental income)

• Current yield: 2,229.3 millió Ft

• Type: Fee

• Notes: Rent the state earns as a landlord of its property portfolio. Falls as the portfolio is divested — but the divested property generates private rental activity (and the property tax and corporate tax that follow) instead.

• Name: Vagyonkezelői díj (Asset-management fee)

• Current yield: 2,184.0 millió Ft

• Type: Fee

• Notes: Fees earned for managing assets. Falls as the managed portfolio shrinks.

• Name: Egyéb eszközök értékesítésből származó bevételek (Revenue from sales of other assets)

• Current yield: 1,355.0 millió Ft

• Type: Other (asset disposal)

• Notes: Proceeds of disposing of movable and other non-property assets.

• Name: Osztalékbevételek — MNV (Dividend income — MNV portfolio)

• Current yield: 40.0 millió Ft

• Type: Other (investment income)

• Notes: Dividends from companies under MNV ownership. The contrast with the 94,805.2 millió Ft NGM dividend line is stark: the MNV-held companies return almost nothing, consistent with the reading that the MNV portfolio is weighted toward property and loss-making or non-distributing companies rather than profitable enterprises.

• Name: Tulajdoni részesedések értékesítéséből származó bevétel (Revenue from sales of ownership stakes)

• Current yield: 5.0 millió Ft

• Type: Other (asset disposal)

• Notes: A nominal 5.0 millió Ft of share-sale revenue — the state is, on the current budget, divesting almost no equity stakes. Under the reform programme this line would rise by orders of magnitude as the profitable NGM-portfolio companies are sold.

No item in this chapter is a tax in the sense of SZJA, ÁFA, or corporate tax. The revenue is investment income, asset-disposal proceeds, and fees — the state earning as an owner, not levying as a sovereign. There is therefore no distortion_rank to assign: distortion ranking applies to compulsory taxes, and these are property and investment receipts.

Chapter Summary

Classification	Count	Total (millió Ft)
Immediate Cut	0	0.0
Phase-Out	10	111,329.8
Nominal Freeze	1	1,000.0
Keep	7	62,291.0
Total	18	174,620.8

Revenue	Total (millió Ft)
Total chapter revenue	142,451.5

Year-1 saving across all phase-out items: 29,028.7 millió Ft. Full steady-state saving once all phase-outs complete: 111,329.8 millió Ft.

Key Observations

• The chapter is the ledger of the state-as-owner — and the reform is to shrink what the state owns, not to abolish ownership administration in the abstract. Several lines (property maintenance, MNV’s operating subsidy, the rents for housing government bodies, asset-management fees on the revenue side) are not independent programmes; they are the overhead of a decision made elsewhere — the decision that the state should hold a large property and enterprise portfolio. They are sized to the portfolio. The honest reform classifies the portfolio decision and lets the overhead follow: divest the non-strategic holdings and the maintenance line, the management subsidy, and the occupied footprint all contract in step.

• The 60,500.0 millió Ft NGM company-injection line is the heart of the chapter, and the 94,805.2 millió Ft dividend line is the reason it cannot be read simply. The portfolio earns more than this line costs. That does not make the line a Keep — it makes it a privatisation candidate. A profitable state company is worth more sold (one-off proceeds, depoliticised operation, ongoing corporate tax) than held for its dividend; a loss-making one exhibits the soft budget constraint and should be made viable or wound down. Aggregating both inside one line obscures which is which. The 5-year phase-out is, in substance, a structured privatisation and restructuring programme.

• The state runs three parallel venture-capital channels here — the 6,975.0 millió Ft capital-funds line, the 9,000.0 millió Ft Nemzeti Tőkeholding line, and the equity-injection components of the company-funding lines. Venture investing is the business of allocating scarce capital across competing, uncertain projects; that allocation is disciplined, in a market, by the investor’s own capital being at risk and by the price signals of competing private bids. A state fund faces neither discipline directly: the officials selecting the investments do not own the capital, and the returns or losses accrue to the budget rather than to them. A private venture market already exists in Hungary. The Nemzeti Tőkeholding’s own model — minimum 30% private co-investment in new funds — concedes the point; where private investors are willing to commit alongside, the market is functioning and the state tranche is crowding in rather than filling a gap.

• “Egyéb” lines are where discretion hides. The 8,000.0 millió Ft “egyéb vagyonkezelési kiadások” line and the 50.0 millió Ft “NGM egyéb kiadások” line are, by their labels, spending the budget does not specify. Unspecified discretionary allocation inside a state asset-management chapter cannot be shown to fund a necessary function; the classification is itemisation-and-reallocation, with genuine residual costs preserved by being moved to named lines.

• Several lines net against matching revenue and are near-neutral pass-throughs: the EU pre-financing expenditure and revenue (5,900.0 each), and the state-inheritance administration cost (2,820.0) against inheritance-realisation revenue (2,760.0). These are not where the fiscal action is; they are correctly classified Keep as mechanical or contractual lines.

• The chapter’s deficit is structural to its current design. It spends 174,620.8 millió Ft and earns 142,451.5 millió Ft because the capital side pumps 87,316.8 millió Ft of fresh equity into the portfolio against only 6,176.0 millió Ft of capital return. A divestment programme inverts this: sales generate one-off capital receipts, the injection lines fall to zero, and the chapter moves from a structural cash drain to a source of non-recurring privatisation revenue — after which the residual chapter is a small ledger of genuinely strategic holdings and the rule-of-property functions (escheat, ownership-liability remediation) that survive the reform on their own merits.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Látványos átalakulás: megváltozott a filmek közvetett támogatási rendszere Magyarországon. Világgazdaság (vg.hu). 2026. https://www.vg.hu/vilaggazdasag-magyar-gazdasag/2026/01/film-filmtamogatas-nemzeti-filmintezet-magyar-kozlony. 2026 deposit-account ceiling 70 milliárd Ft, down from 81 milliárd Ft in 2025; 30% rebate on direct Hungarian production costs unchanged. ↩

2. After: Amelyik filmnek már megítélték az állami támogatást, az meg is fogja azt kapni a Filmintézet szerint. Telex. 2026. https://telex.hu/after/2026/04/15/nemzeti-filmintezet-tamogatasok-filmek. National Film Institute statement that films already granted state support will receive it. ↩

3. Nemzeti Cégtár — MNV Zrt. Nemzeti Cégtár. 2025. https://www.nemzeticegtar.hu/mnv-zrt-c0110045784.html. Employee count band listed as “300 - 499 Fő”. ↩ ↩²

4. Payroll share estimate. The 60% payroll share of MNV Zrt.’s operating subsidy is an analyst estimate based on the standard cost structure of a professional-services / asset-management body whose principal output is administrative labour, not a fetched figure from MNV’s audited accounts; flagged as directional rather than fresh-fetched. A primary-source check against MNV Zrt.’s published annual accounts (személyi juttatások + munkaadókat terhelő járulékok / total operating expenditure) is recommended before the severance computation is treated as final. ↩

5. New Zealand Treasury, State-Owned Enterprises Act 1986 — Annual Report on State-Owned Enterprises. New Zealand Treasury. https://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/informationreleases/soe. The Act reconstituted all government trading entities as commercial enterprises with independent boards, dividend obligations, and standard accounting; SOE-sector dividend revenue rose sharply following the reform. See also: New Zealand Productivity Commission, Using land for housing, 2015, Chapter 4 (state-entity governance comparators). ↩ ↩²

6. Combined labour-tax wedge derivation from public statutory rates (2024/2025). Employer SzocHo: 13% of gross; full employer cost = 113% of declared gross. Employee deductions on declared gross: SZJA 15% + social-insurance contributions ~18.5% (TB járulék 7% + nyugdíjjárulék 10% + munkaerőpiaci járulék 1.5%) = 33.5%; net take-home = 66.5% of declared gross = 58.8% of employer cost. Consumption-tax overlay: applying 27% ÁFA to an estimated 70% of net take-home spending (standard share for Hungarian consumption structure per KSH household expenditure surveys) yields a further ~13–14 pp of employer cost absorbed in VAT. All-in effective wedge: 55–60% of full employer compensation. Rate components from NAV (Nemzeti Adó- és Vámhivatal) tariff table 2025; KSH, Háztartások életszínvonala 2023 (HÉ23), Table 4.1 (consumption-expenditure shares). ↩

7. National Audit Office, The Privatisation of the Water Industry in England and Wales, HC 674, Session 1992-93. HMSO, 1992. https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/privatisation-water-industry-england-wales/. UK privatisations 1979-1997: clear productivity gains in competitive sectors (telecoms, airlines); more contested outcomes in network-monopoly sectors (water, rail) requiring careful regulator design. See also: Institute for Fiscal Studies, Privatisation: the facts, in The IFS Green Budget, various years, https://ifs.org.uk/. ↩

8. Jön a Nemzeti Tőkeholding! Egy kézbe vonja össze a tőkealapjait az állam. Portfolio.hu. 2022. https://www.portfolio.hu/gazdasag/20221024/jon-a-nemzeti-tokeholding-egy-kezbe-vonja-ossze-a-tokealapjait-az-allam-574599. Nemzeti Tőkeholding established to consolidate the state’s partly/wholly state-backed capital funds (operational from January 2023); new funds structured with minimum 30% private co-investment, state share up to 70%. ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Invest Europe, Central and Eastern Europe Private Equity Statistics 2022. Invest Europe. 2023. https://www.investeurope.eu/research/invest-europe-s-reports/. Hungary: 39 private equity and venture capital funds active; new investment in Hungarian portfolio companies approximately €420 million in 2022. ↩