Part I — Situation overview

On the evening of Friday 3 July 2026, Kapitány István, minister for the economy and energy, announced on his social-media page that, exercising the owner’s rights — that is, acting in the name of the owner of the state-owned company — he had recalled Guller Zoltán from the chairmanship and, at the same time, the board membership of the Hungarian Tourism Agency (MTÜ) Zrt. The move came a few days after Finance Minister Kármán András had also dismissed Guller from the chairman-CEO post of Szerencsejáték Zrt. Within a single week, then, he had to leave the top of two different state companies — following the ownership decisions of two different ministries.

Guller Zoltán is not a minor player in Hungarian state tourism: between 2016 and 2022 he was CEO and then chairman of the board of the MTÜ, and from March 2025 he also headed Szerencsejáték Zrt. For a long time the press regarded the MTÜ as one of the strong centres of NER (the “System of National Cooperation”, the colloquial name for the post-2010 network of governmental and business interests). Through years of litigation 24.hu established that during the Covid pandemic the MTÜ, within the framework of the Kisfaludy Programme, had secretly handed out several hundred million forints as individual subsidies without any tender — and that, contrary to earlier statements, these decisions were made not by a professional panel but practically by Guller Zoltán alone. According to the revealed data, two-thirds of a roughly 300-billion-forint tourism-subsidy envelope was received by half a percent of the applicants.

In MIAK’s reading the real stake of the present news is not the change of personnel, but what will happen to the public money behind it. The recall of a leader is an ownership and asset-management act, not an anti-corruption reform: the decision-making mechanism that made possible the tender-free, single-person distribution of subsidies remains untouched by the person’s departure. The character of the problem is structural — it was created jointly by the monopoly position, the wide discretion and the absence of accountability — and therefore the answer, too, has to be system-level, not the withdrawal of a single appointment.

Part II — Literature foundation

Before turning to MIAK’s proposals it is worth fixing the conceptual frame. The famous formula of Robert Klitgaard’s Controlling Corruption (1988) — Corruption = Monopoly + Discretion − Accountability (C = M + D − A) — describes precisely the structure of the MTÜ case: a single actor, in a monopoly position, with wide discretion and without meaningful accountability, decided the fate of public money. Susan Rose-Ackerman’s Corruption and Government (1999) distinguishes system-level, elite-driven corruption from occasional official bribery — this difference gives the main argument that a change of personnel in itself solves nothing if the incentive structure remains. In the sense of Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail (2012) conceptual pair — the opposition of inclusive and extractive institutions — the tender-free distribution of subsidies favouring a narrow circle is exactly the pattern of the extractive logic: the institution serves not the common good but the resource-servicing of an elite. The detailed literature treatment — by author, with source attribution — can be found in section 6.4 Literature in detail.

Part III — MIAK’s concrete proposal

MIAK proposes three measurable measures that, in place of person-dependent decision-making, make the path of public money transparent and verifiable after the fact.

3.1 Retrospective screening of the tourism subsidies (within 90 days)

The first step is the clarification of the past. MIAK proposes that the MTÜ’s exercising owner order a full, public screening of the Kisfaludy Programme and the related individual tourism subsidies: who the beneficiaries were, with what sums, with what justification and against what performance. In Klitgaard’s C = M + D − A frame (see 6.4.1) this strengthens the A (accountability) factor: publicity is itself the control. Where a subsidy did not fulfil its purpose, the clawback mechanism set out in the A8 accountability programme is to be applied. An important point of legal precision: this step is not a criminal-law verdict — establishing a possible crime is exclusively within the competence of the prosecution and the courts; the screening is a tool of ownership and public control.

3.2 Real-time public-money dashboard and machine-readable asset data (from the next budget year)

The clarification of the past must be followed by the transparency of the future. MIAK’s A1 public-money dashboard programme prescribes real-time, machine-readable publicity for every expenditure of public money — extending also to the individual subsidies and board remuneration of state companies. This is accompanied by the A3 programme: the asset declarations of public figures should be available not as scanned PDFs but as comparable data, with automatic cross-checking against the property and company registers. The MTÜ case shows well why: when a single decision-maker distributed several hundred million forints without a tender, the missing link was precisely real-time, searchable publicity. The AI-based anomaly detector of the A2 public-procurement transparency carries the same logic further: it does not pass judgement but flags suspicious patterns (recurring winners, individual adjudication); investigation remains a human task.

3.3 Mandatory ex post impact assessment for state subsidies (a 12–18-month cycle)

The third proposal puts an institutionalised review in place of single-person discretion. The G20 economic-policy impact-assessment system (Drucker audit — an ex post impact assessment of the state measures taken, comparing the expected and the actual result) prescribes for every major state-subsidy programme: before the decision the expected result must be recorded, and after 12–18 months it is mandatory to compare it with the actual effect. Linked to this is the G19 radical transparency in economic decision-making programme, which prescribes public reasoning and decision-maker traceability behind every economic-policy decision. In this way the question “who decided and why?” is answered not by years-long litigation, but by the system itself.

These three proposals are held together by a single principle: power over public money should be tied not to a person but to a transparent, subsequently verifiable rule. In the logic of the G6 programme against rent-seeking and regulatory capture, the goal is precisely to end privileged access to public money — the removal will be more than a symbolic gesture only if the decision-making structure changes as well.

Part IV — Expected impacts and risks

Dimension Expected impact Risk
Economy More transparent, performance-linked state subsidy; declining rent-seeking Clawback and stricter control may in the short run slow down the use of resources (absorption)
Society Strengthening public trust; a perceptible improvement in the fairness of public-money distribution If only the person changes but not the system, the public may become disillusioned (“showcase accountability”)
Public administration Institutionalised, rule-based decision-making in place of single-person discretion Machine-readable asset and subsidy data raise data-protection and data-security questions

The main consideration is that a change of personnel and a reform of the system are not the same: the recall that has just taken place is an ownership and asset-management decision, which in itself does not affect the rules of subsidy distribution. The proposal works if the screening ends with a public result, if the public-money dashboard is genuinely real-time and searchable, and if the clawback does not remain on paper. Otherwise there is a danger that the spectacular removal masks the decision-making mechanism left unchanged.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth tracking? (suggested KPIs)

The success of the proposal is worth tracking on the basis of a few suggested performance indicators (KPIs, from which it is visible whether it has succeeded):

  • the share of tender-free, individual state tourism subsidies within the total subsidy envelope (suggested target: a meaningful, documented decrease within two years);
  • the share of public-money expenditure with machine-readable, real-time publicity, including the individual subsidies of state companies;
  • the share of public figures’ asset declarations available in machine-readable format (suggested target: 100 percent);
  • the share of the sum clawed back from subsidies paid out without entitlement or without fulfilling their purpose.

5.2 Summary

MIAK’s key message: removal is not accountability. MIAK asks the exercising owner and the decision-makers to accompany the change of personnel with a public screening of the public money of NER tourism, a real-time public-money dashboard and a mandatory ex post impact assessment — that is, let the decision-making structure change, not only the decision-maker. In this two MIAK foundational values move together: accountability, because power over public money must be paired with responsibility that carries public consequences; and transparency, because in practice the accountability factor of the Klitgaard formula is provided by searchable, machine-readable publicity — the missing link that for years could be supplied only through litigation.

Part VI — Justifications and further sources

6.1 Press framing by spectrum

The economic and public-affairs band (Portfolio, 24.hu) highlighted above all the fact and the official chronology: who recalled Guller, when, from what position, and that the reasons for the decision were not disclosed. The left-liberal and public-affairs band (Telex, 444.hu, HVG) put the background at the centre: the MTÜ’s NER-embeddedness, the tender-free subsidies of the Kisfaludy Programme and the litigation that revealed the earlier single-person decision-making. 444.hu separately highlighted the disproportionate distribution of the subsidies and the actor’s extensive network of state positions. The pro-government-conservative band (Mandiner) carried the news in a terse, fact-reporting form, confining itself to the personal and organisational circumstances and avoiding evaluative framing. Népszava carried the topic at title level (title-level reference only). The framings thus differ along the mere fact and the system-level background; MIAK’s ideology-free reading interprets the two removals as a single question — the absence of public-money accountability — regardless of the political judgement of the actor.

6.2 Facts and data

  • The recall of Guller Zoltán from the chairmanship and board membership of MTÜ Zrt.: Kapitány István’s announcement, 3 July 2026.
  • Dismissal from the chairman-CEO post of Szerencsejáték Zrt.: Kármán András’s announcement, a few days earlier.
  • Guller’s remuneration (24.hu): as CEO of Szerencsejáték Zrt., a gross 5 million forints per month; as chairman of the MTÜ board, 2,259,600 forints.
  • Individual, tender-free subsidies secretly distributed in 2020 within the framework of the Kisfaludy Programme: several hundred million forints (24.hu, revealed after litigation).
  • Two-thirds of a roughly 300-billion-forint tourism-subsidy envelope was received by half a percent of the applicants (444.hu).
  • Hungary’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) 2024 — control of corruption indicator: −0.17 (World Bank WGI), which signals institutional control lagging behind the EU average.

6.3 Policy aspects

  • Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points) — the gravitational centre of the topic: the public-money dashboard, asset-declaration publicity, public-procurement transparency and cohesion accountability;
  • Economy (programme points) — the frame of action against rent-seeking, the economic-policy impact assessment (Drucker audit) and radical transparency in decision-making.

6.4 Literature in detail

6.4.1 Robert Klitgaard: Controlling Corruption

The core of Klitgaard’s corruption analysis is the C = M + D − A formula: corruption flourishes where a monopoly position and wide discretion meet the absence of accountability. On the basis of the experience of anti-corruption agencies (for example the Hong Kong and Singapore models), the work shows that control has to be strengthened simultaneously by narrowing discretion and by building up accountability. Translated to the MTÜ case: when a single decision-maker distributed public money without a tender, all three factors pointed in the direction of corruption risk — MIAK’s proposals (public screening, public-money dashboard, impact assessment) aim precisely at reducing D and increasing A.

📖 Source: Robert Klitgaard: Controlling Corruption

6.4.2 Susan Rose-Ackerman: Corruption and Government

Rose-Ackerman is a classic of the economic and institutional analysis of corruption: she distinguishes system-level corruption, seated at the core of state decision-making, from occasional, low-level official bribery, and points out that the two require different remedies. In high-level, elite-driven resource distribution the effective tool is not fines but the transformation of the incentive structure and of publicity. This distinction gives MIAK’s main argument that a change of personnel is not enough: if the institutional possibility of individual, discretion-based subsidy distribution remains, the same risk exists with the next decision-maker.

📖 Source: Susan Rose-Ackerman: Corruption and Government — Causes, Consequences, and Reform

6.4.3 Acemoglu–Robinson: Why Nations Fail

According to Acemoglu and Robinson, the long-term success or failure of nations is determined primarily by their institutions. Inclusive institutions share power and economic benefit broadly and encourage innovation; extractive institutions concentrate both in the hands of a narrow elite. The tender-free distribution of tourism subsidies favouring a circle close to power is exactly a textbook example of the extractive logic: the state instrument serves not competition and the common good, but the resource-servicing of a closed circle. MIAK’s proposals — public accountability and rule-based tendering open to all — try to move this extractive pattern in an inclusive direction.

📖 Source: Daron Acemoglu – James A. Robinson: Why Nations Fail

6.5 International comparison

The international practice of public-money accountability shows that publicity is the most effective control. The Slovak contract register (e-Zmluvy, 2011) prescribes the online publication of every state contract; after its introduction, public-procurement prices in the transparent categories fell measurably. In the case of the Brazilian transparency portal (Portal da Transparência, since 2004), a significant part of the revealed corruption cases started from civic data analyses. The Ukrainian ProZorro public-procurement system drastically reduced the share of single-bid procedures. These examples are working models for MIAK’s public-money dashboard and public-procurement transparency proposals: what is decisive is not ex post punishment but prior, searchable publicity.

Transparency and anti-corruption policy

  • A1 — Public-money dashboard
  • A2 — Public-procurement transparency
  • A3 — Publicity of asset declarations
  • A8 — Cohesion-policy accountability

Economy

  • G6 — Programme against rent-seeking and regulatory capture
  • G19 — Radical transparency in economic decision-making
  • G20 — Economic-policy impact-assessment system (Drucker audit)

6.7 Source register

Press sources (MIAK press monitor, 4 July 2026 — topic 2):

Knowledge-base references (literature):

  • 📖 Robert Klitgaard: Controlling Corruption
  • 📖 Susan Rose-Ackerman: Corruption and Government — Causes, Consequences, and Reform
  • 📖 Daron Acemoglu – James A. Robinson: Why Nations Fail

Note: in the blog’s visible text only the author and the title appear for the books; the local file path is an internal matter of the generation process.

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points; programme point ID: A1)
  • MIAK policy area: Economy (programme points; programme point ID: G6)
  • MIAK press monitor, 4 July 2026 — topic 2, score: 78/100

Additional public data sources:

  • World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) 2024 — control of corruption indicator.

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