Part I — Situation overview

Parliament is holding a two-day extraordinary session on 27–28 August 2026, and of its final agenda items the most important comes on Friday, foreseeably between 9.45 and 10.45: the MPs decide by secret ballot on the persons of the president and vice-presidents of the National Asset Recovery and Asset Protection Office (NVVH). The office holders elected take an oath after the announcement of the result. A total of 96 people applied for the post of president. Parliament’s justice and constitutional affairs committee selected three applicants for a hearing at a closed sitting — Miklós Ligeti, legal director of Transparency International Hungary, Anna Róza Unger, associate professor of political science at ELTE, and the corruption researcher Dávid Jancsics — and they were joined by a fourth, invited by right of the parliamentary group: Nicholas Sárvári, the candidate of the Tisza group. On Monday evening, two days before the vote, Dávid Jancsics announced that he was withdrawing: by his own account the office now needs an “implacable” head, while he could rather contribute to working out a long-term anti-corruption institutional system.

On the same Monday the Fidesz group announced that it would take part neither in the nomination nor in the selection, and that it was initiating a review by the Constitutional Court of the act on the creation of the NVVH. According to its announcement a similar organisation “last operated in the darkest years of communism”, and it considers the regulation of the office unconstitutional on several points, referring to the fact that the NVVH may examine, investigate, bring charges, take over pending cases, carry out interception, decide on coercive measures and employ undercover investigators. In public law terms this motion is a subsequent abstract norm control: under Article 24 of the Fundamental Law the Government or one quarter of the members of Parliament may initiate an examination by the Constitutional Court of the conformity of a legal rule with the Fundamental Law — Fidesz–KDNP’s 52 seats in the 199-member Parliament exceed this threshold. An important distinction: the Constitutional Court does not in such a case act as a court of appeal and does not automatically suspend the act, but examines the norm from the point of view of constitutionality. Meanwhile an opinion piece in 444.hu — from a non-pro-government side — wrote that the selection “should have been the cleanest procedure”, whereas in the paper’s view it had become muddled; the dispute around the committee’s preparatory work also concerned the range of civil society organisations to be involved in setting up the office.

MIAK has a record on this topic: on 11 August MIAK wrote that in two mutually independent August decisions — over the rail projects of the Baross plan and over the leadership positions of the NVVH — the same thing was at stake: whether the assessment criteria are published before the decision. That question is now not theoretical: the vote takes place within 48 hours, and as things stand today the public knows neither the scored suitability criteria nor the reasoning of the closed committee sitting. On MIAK’s reading, at the NVVH the primary risk is not the breadth of the powers but whether, after the office’s first serious case lost with final effect, the circumstances of the appointment can be invoked. For the lifetime of an asset recovery authority is not one parliamentary term: the proceedings it launches run for years, and the next governing majority also has to accept the office, otherwise all its cases can be reopened as political acts.

Part II — Foundations in the literature

Before turning to MIAK’s concrete proposals it is worth fixing the scholarly framework. Susan Rose-Ackerman (an American lawyer-economist, one of the founding authors of corruption research, professor at Yale) explains in her work Corruption and Government the 1974 setting up of Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) not by its powers but by the details of its institutional design: to whom the body reports, who cannot be transferred, and by what its credibility can be measured — this set of criteria can be carried over directly to the present Hungarian situation. Lee Kuan Yew (founding prime minister of Singapore, 1959–1990) describes at first hand in his memoir From Third World to First that Singapore’s Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) really did receive extremely broad powers: arrest, examination of bank accounts, and even the reversal of the burden of proof in cases of unexplained enrichment. This description simultaneously supports both the argument for the Hungarian office’s powers and the argument for limiting them. The difference is that in Singapore judicial control and public procedural rules narrowing discretion went with them. Montesquieu (an eighteenth-century French legal philosopher, the author of the doctrine of the separation of powers) fixes in The Spirit of the Laws the proposition, still valid today, that the legitimacy of an extraordinary power derives from its limitation in time — this gives the theoretical basis for MIAK’s proposal on a sunset date. The detailed treatment of the literature — author by author, with quotations — can be found in section 6.4 Literature in detail.

Part III — MIAK’s concrete proposal

MIAK proposes three measurable measures: the first two can be delivered before Friday’s vote, the third requires an amendment of the act.

3.1 Public minutes of the hearing and a pre-published, scored suitability standard (before the vote, within 48 hours)

MIAK proposes that the justice and constitutional affairs committee should publish, before Friday’s vote, the full, unedited minutes of the candidate hearings — together with the audio recording in the case of what was said at the open sitting — and that it should at the same time publish the scored system of suitability criteria on the basis of which the committee selected the three heard from among the 96 applicants. The criteria should appear not as subsequent justification but as a standard fixed in advance: professional record, anti-corruption experience, managerial practice, independence and conflict-of-interest profile, each of them weighted. This is the application to a concrete appointment of the A6 checks and balances programme point and of the logic of the I10 constitutional stress test. What is at stake is practical: the scored standard is the only instrument with which the elected president can later prove that he or she is the result not of a political bargain but of a comparative assessment — and this argument will also be usable in the next term, regardless of who is in the majority.

3.2 An asset declaration and a conflict-of-interest declaration from every candidate, before the vote (immediately)

MIAK proposes that all four — after the withdrawal, three — candidates should publish their asset declaration and detailed conflict-of-interest declaration before the vote, in machine-readable form, extending also to the involvement of family members. This is the direct application of programme point A3 (publicity of asset declarations, as data and not as a scanned document). In the case of the NVVH the point is particularly sharp: the office’s main instrument will be the examination of other people’s financial position, and its first head therefore either establishes or damages the credibility of the institution by whether he or she applies the same standard to themselves. In the present field this is relevant from several points of view — the candidates have differing professional backgrounds, and among them there is an applicant with international business experience and one with a civil society background — and the declarations matter precisely because they close off the questions that arise with data rather than with supposition.

3.3 A sunset date for the broadest powers and mandatory parliamentary review (in the next package of amendments)

The powers named by Fidesz — examination, investigation, taking over pending cases, covert intelligence gathering, the employment of undercover investigators — raise a substantive public law question, regardless of whether the point is raised from political motives. MIAK’s non-ideological position is this: the question is not whether these powers are justified, but whether they are limited in time and in procedure. MIAK therefore proposes that the act should attach a sunset date (a point in time fixed in the act at which a rule automatically ceases to have effect unless the legislator amends it beforehand) to the broadest instruments, those similar to the instruments of the ordinary investigating authorities — on MIAK’s proposal three years from entry into force — and should prescribe that before that deadline Parliament must assess, on the basis of public data, the actual application of the instruments: in how many cases, at what case value, with what judicial authorisation and with what result. Montesquieu’s proposition (see 6.4.3) is about exactly this: an extraordinary authorisation is compatible with liberty if it is for a short and limited time. This solution also improves the office’s legal position regardless of the outcome of the Constitutional Court proceedings — in the model of an anti-corruption office under programme point A10, powers and accountability are to be designed together.

The three proposals are linked by a single principle: the result of asset recovery will be decided not by the strength of the office but by its unassailability. A strong institution of contestable origin fights a two-front battle in every case — with the assets and with its own legitimacy — and the second front cannot be won after the fact.

Part IV — Expected effects and risks

Dimension Expected effect Risk
Justice A public standard and a sunset date reduce the chance of later procedural objections; cases are decided on the merits, not on procedural error The publicity of the minutes may also make public the candidates’ statements on pending cases, which may violate personality rights — publicity should therefore extend to the parts concerning the candidate and not third persons
Public administration The scored selection standard creates a precedent for the appointment of the heads of other independent regulatory and supervisory bodies too If the standard is shaped after the fact to fit the winner, the credibility of the model deteriorates in the long run — worse than if there were no standard at all
Society The prior publication of asset declarations reduces the basis for later personal attacks against the office Some of the candidates may withdraw from publicity; the narrowing of the field is in itself a quality risk

The main point of judgement is time. The value of proposals 3.1 and 3.2 lies in their being delivered before the vote; after the fact both become mere documentation and do not affect how the decision is judged. Proposal 3.3, by contrast, can deliberately be scheduled later: introducing the sunset date requires an amendment of the act, and the outcome of the Constitutional Court’s proceedings also has to be taken into account. The package tips to the risk side where the publicity requirement extends also to the operational part of the office’s work: detailed publicity for the concrete, pending cases of an asset recovery authority may damage the possibility of proof. MIAK therefore consistently proposes publicity for the selection and for the subsequent statistical assessment, not for operational cases.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth following? (proposed KPIs)

MIAK proposes the following performance indicators (KPIs, Key Performance Indicators) for monitoring — these are proposals, not government decisions:

  • Procedural publicity before the vote: whether the scored suitability standard and the minutes of the hearing were published by the morning of 28 August 2026 (yes/no).
  • Proportion of reports made under a name: what percentage of the reports arriving at the office in its first full year of operation are not anonymous — Rose-Ackerman regards this as the empirical indicator of credibility (worth following above 30 per cent, end of 2027).
  • Case outcome ratio: how many of the asset recovery proceedings launched by the NVVH close with a substantive court decision and how many on procedural grounds (a substantive ratio above 70 per cent is worth aiming at, end of 2028).
  • Report on the use of instruments: whether public, aggregated statistics on the application of covert intelligence gathering and coercive measures appear annually (yes/no, first time in 2027).

5.2 Summary

MIAK’s request to the decision-maker is concrete and short in deadline: before Friday’s vote, Parliament’s justice and constitutional affairs committee should publish the minutes of the candidate hearings and the scored suitability standard, and the candidates their asset and conflict-of-interest declarations. And of the public the request is that it should tie its judgement of the office not to the person of its head but to the documentability of the selection — the former lasts four years, the latter for the whole lifetime of the institution.

This request follows from two MIAK foundational values. Accountability is engaged because an asset recovery authority is itself an actor subject to accountability: an institution that examines the origin of other people’s assets is credible only if the selection of its own head is likewise verifiable. And being ideology-free, because MIAK treats Fidesz’s Constitutional Court motion not as a political attack but as a substantive public law question: the breadth and the limitation in time of powers is a standard that has to be applied in the same way to every government — including the one that created the office.

Part VI — Justifications and further sources

6.1 The framing of the press, spectrum by spectrum

The framing of the liberal-left band was on this day unusually critical of the government side. The opinion piece in 444.hu — whose author starts from the tension between the campaign promise (“handcuffs, handcuffs, bars, bars”) and its implementation — criticises not the existence of the office but the quality of the selection: the argument is that at this institution of all institutions an unassailable procedure would have mattered most. The same paper presents in a separate article, factually and at length, the professional careers of all four candidates — this is the most detailed candidate profile material among the papers monitored. Telex pursues the agenda and procedural thread (extraordinary session, withdrawal), and HVG likewise on two threads: alongside the parliamentary timetable it processes the candidates’ earlier public statements on NER corruption — that is, it puts the professional record at the centre of the standard.

The public affairs and economic band follows the process, without evaluation. 24.hu confines itself to the fact of the withdrawal, and Portfolio, fitting it into the daily flow of economic news, signals the start of the hearings in the same article as the budget announcement — here the setting up of the office appears as an economic and asset management event, not as a public law question.

The pro-government and conservative band puts the objection about competences in the middle of the frame, and it is the only band that deals substantively with the content of the powers. Mandiner reproduces the Fidesz group’s announcement verbatim, including the itemised list of the powers — this list is verifiable in factual terms, and proposal III.3 of the present analysis is built precisely on it. The group’s historical parallel (“last in the darkest years of communism”) is a rhetorical device, and MIAK does not share it; the procedural question behind it — whether there is a limit in time and a judicial limit on extraordinary instruments — is however substantive. Magyar Nemzet reports the timetable of the vote in a shorter news item, and elsewhere highlights the dual citizenship of Tisza’s candidate. All in all the two sides of the spectrum signal two different gaps: the liberal-left band demands the cleanness of the procedure, the pro-government band the limits of the powers — MIAK’s proposals answer both objections, independently of each other as well.

6.2 Facts and data

Data Value Source
Number of applicants for the post of president 96 444.hu, 24 August 2026
Applicants selected for a hearing by the committee 3 444.hu, 24 August 2026
Further candidate invited by right of the parliamentary group 1 (Tisza group) 444.hu, 24 August 2026
Candidates withdrawn 1 (24 August 2026, Monday evening) Telex / 24.hu, 24 August 2026
Extraordinary parliamentary session 27–28 August 2026 (Thursday–Friday) HVG, 24 August 2026
Time of the secret ballot Friday, approx. 9.45–10.45 HVG, 24 August 2026
Fidesz–KDNP seats 52 / 199 NVI, 19 April 2026
Proportion needed to initiate subsequent norm control one quarter of the members of Parliament (50 persons) Fundamental Law, Article 24
Hungary’s governance quality indicator (control of corruption) −0.17 (2024) World Bank WGI 2024

The last three rows of the table are to be read together. Fidesz–KDNP’s 52 seats exceed the 50-person threshold needed to initiate subsequent norm control, so submitting the motion is not a political gesture but an exercisable constitutional entitlement — MIAK regards this as the normal working of checks and balances. And the World Bank’s governance quality indicator signals the starting position from which the NVVH sets out: Hungary’s control of corruption value was in negative territory in 2024, which means that the new office has to recover not only assets but also institutional trust.

6.3 Policy dimensions

  • Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points) — the programme points on an independent corruption investigation office, on the publicity of asset declarations and on checks and balances are directly engaged; the centre of gravity of the topic.
  • Justice (programme points) — the constitutional stress test and the procedural guarantees of the protection of property rights give the legal framework of asset recovery.
  • Public administration and e-government (programme points) — the system of official selection and the verification of proportionality of assets as a general model for public administration.

6.4 Literature in detail

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

Rose-Ackerman treats the 1974 setting up of Hong Kong’s ICAC as a case study, and finds the explanation of its success not in the body’s powers but in the details of institutional design. According to the description the ICAC reported exclusively to the governor, was organisationally separated from the police, its officials were entitled to higher pay than other civil servants, they could not be transferred to other organisations, and within the body nobody could come under a superior against whom an investigation had previously been conducted. For measuring credibility the author names two empirical indicators: the sharp growth in the number of reports reaching the new institution, and the fact that a large share of the reports were not anonymous.

“The credibility of the new institution is indicated by the increased number of complaints reaching it at its establishment, as well as by the high proportion of non-anonymous complaints.”

In the case of the Hungarian NVVH this second indicator is particularly important, and MIAK therefore proposes it as a performance indicator (5.1). A recurring element in descriptions of the Hungarian corruption situation is fear of retaliation; if in the NVVH’s first year a substantial part of the reports arrive with a name, that means that the reporters trust the office’s protection — and this says far more about the state of the institution than the press echo of any proceedings launched.

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

6.4.2 Lee Kuan Yew: From Third World to First

Lee Kuan Yew’s memoir is particularly relevant now because it does not gloss over the breadth of the powers of Singapore’s anti-corruption office (CPIB). The author describes how in 1960 the outdated anti-corruption act of 1937 was rewritten, the concept of unlawful advantage was extended, and the investigators received broad powers — arrest, search, and the examination of the bank accounts of suspects and of their family members. The most important change, however, was the transformation of the rules of proof: the court could accept assets not explicable from the defendant’s income as indirect evidence of bribery.

“The most effective change we made in 1960 was that the courts could treat proof that an accused was living beyond his means or had unexplained property as corroborating evidence that the accused had accepted a bribe.”

This description gives an argument to both sides in the present Hungarian debate, and it is precisely for this reason that MIAK quotes it. Those who dispute the office’s broad powers can rightly refer to the fact that these instruments strain the classical guarantees of criminal procedure. Those who defend the office can rightly refer to the fact that the Singaporean model mentioned as an international example operated with exactly such instruments. MIAK’s reading runs between the two: the Singaporean instruments worked not on their own but exclusively alongside judicial control and together with public procedural rules narrowing discretion — Lee Kuan Yew himself stresses that in smaller matters the main instrument was the simplification of procedures and the removal of discretionary powers, not tightening. MIAK’s proposal 3.3 would supply this addition in the Hungarian regulation.

📖 Source: Lee Kuan Yew: From Third World to First — The Singapore Story 1965–2000

6.4.3 Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws

Montesquieu’s classic proposition is that liberty does not exist where legislative and executive power are united in one hand, nor where judicial power is not separated from the other two. From the point of view of the present Hungarian debate, however, the decisive point is a less frequently quoted but more precisely fitting observation of the author: an extraordinary authorisation is not inherently incompatible with liberty if it is limited in time.

“If, however, the legislature believes that the state is endangered by a secret conspiracy or by a connection with an external enemy, it may authorise the executive power to take suspected persons into custody for a short and limited time.”

The structure of the proposition is exactly what MIAK proposes: an extraordinary instrument is legitimate if (a) the legislature grants it rather than the executive taking it; (b) it serves a determined, narrow purpose; and (c) it is for a short and limited time. In its present form the Hungarian NVVH act satisfies the first two conditions — the powers were granted by Parliament, and the purpose of asset recovery is determined — but not the third: the competences are not tied to time. MIAK’s proposal 3.3 (a three-year sunset date for the broadest instruments, with mandatory parliamentary review) would supply this missing third condition — not as a weakening of the office but as a strengthening of its legitimacy.

📖 Source: Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws

6.5 International comparison

The international experience of anti-corruption authorities offers two mutually complementary lessons. One is the side of the appointment procedure: Hong Kong’s ICAC and Singapore’s CPIB both operated in a set-up in which the head of the office was organisationally separated from every body it had to investigate, and could not be transferred. In Hungary the equivalent of this structural guarantee is a long mandate reaching across terms and a publicly documented selection — on the mandate side the Hungarian regulation provides for this, on the selection side at present it does not. The other lesson comes from failures: in several European countries anti-corruption agencies lost their room for manoeuvre precisely because, after the first change of government, confidence was withdrawn from them by reference to the political origin of the appointment of their head, and the institution was weakened by reorganisation. In the Hungarian situation this is the most concrete risk: the NVVH’s cases reach beyond the present parliamentary term, and the durability of the institution is therefore ensured not by the strength of today’s majority but by the unassailability of the selection. The Venice Commission’s opinions on anti-corruption authorities and the evaluation reports of GRECO (the Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption) consistently highlight the same aspect: the chief test of an authority’s independence is not its powers but the regulation of the appointment and irremovability of its head.

Transparency and anti-corruption policy

  • A3 — Publicity of asset declarations
  • A6 — Strengthening checks and balances
  • A10 — Independent Corruption Investigation Office (CPIB model)

Justice

  • I5 — Protection of property rights
  • I10 — Constitutional ‘stress test’

Public administration and e-government

  • KI7 — Official selection and rotation system

Proposed new programme point: Sunset rule for extraordinary powers — for the Transparency and anti-corruption policy area: a mandatory sunset date and a mandatory parliamentary review based on public data for the powers of every new authority receiving instruments similar to those of the ordinary investigating authorities.

6.7 List of sources

Press sources (MIAK press monitor, 25 August 2026 — topic 2):

Knowledge base references (literature):

  • 📖 Susan Rose-Ackerman: Corruption and Government — Causes, Consequences, and Reform
  • 📖 Lee Kuan Yew: From Third World to First — The Singapore Story 1965–2000
  • 📖 Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws

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

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points; programme point ID: A10)
  • MIAK policy area: Justice (programme points; programme point ID: I10)
  • MIAK policy area: Public administration and e-government (programme points; programme point ID: KI7)
  • MIAK press monitor, 25 August 2026 — topic 2, score: 92/100

Supplementary public data sources:

  • Fundamental Law of Hungary, Article 24 (the powers of the Constitutional Court); NVI — final result of the 2026 parliamentary election; World Bank WGI 2024 — governance quality indicators; Transparency International — Corruption Perceptions Index; Venice Commission and GRECO — opinions and evaluation reports on anti-corruption authorities.

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