Gyenis Ágnes

In the first instance, the one hundred billion dollar businessman László Bige, the “fertilizer king”, was placed under criminal supervision. This means that, at the moment, you can only leave your multi-hectare farm in the outer Nyíregyháza area with a permit, lawyer Péter Zamecsnik told hvg.hu. He and the prosecutor appealed the decision.

The court ruled that Bige would obstruct criminal proceedings on parole, but there was no fear that he would hide or flee, as he might have done in recent months. The prosecution also suspects that László Bige bribed 800 million guilders, saying that he sold good quality fertilizers at a discount to wholesalers, who then resell them at market prices and share the profits with the businessman. With this, he is said to have damaged his own company, Nitrogénművek Vegyipari Zrt., Which is a market leader. The company said in a statement along with the owner-manager arrested on Tuesday.

“In the current suspicion, the prosecution highlighted transactions with a merchant that took place between 2011 and 2016,” Zamecsnik told our newspaper. However, bribery is not suspicious, which may be due to cooperation with the authorities. His identity is secret, but according to hvg.hu, he is a Tata wholesaler with a turnover of several billion guilders a year and his owner.

By the way, since the beginning of the criminal process a year and a half ago, Bige denies that he has committed any anarchy, according to him, the background of the case is that someone wants to destroy and take over his business for a purse. In a previous interview, he said that he had been told that if he did not leave the country, he would be in prison. It is certainly not a coincidence, by the way, that just prior to his current arrest, Bige announced that 2020 will be one of the most successful years for Nitrogen Works, both commercially and financially. The company, with annual turnover of HUF 80-90 billion, posted an additional loss of HUF 15 billion in 2018, but was already profitable at HUF 800 million last year. At the same time, the company had liabilities in excess of HUF 130 billion, which tripled its equity at the end of 2019.

This is not the first investigation into Bige’s companies

A series of attacks have affected Bige’s companies (not only in Péti, but also in Szolnok) in the last two years; competition investigations and environmental investigations were complementary. During one of the on-site environmental inspections, the Szolnok plant was temporarily closed last year.

Hungarian billionaire László Bige is being sentenced to prison

The quarantine period was also extreme this year because there were those who were obese and there were those who had to be without it, says Simon Szabó. In acting, the actor sees an opportunity to get something good out of this year.

For more than two years, the Hungarian Competition Authority has been investigating the main players in the Hungarian fertilizer market for cartels, such as trade that makes it impossible to import from the EU at low prices, including even suspicious transactions of Bige. However, the process has not yet produced results, the authority responded to hvg.hu’s request today that the process is still ongoing and so far they have not filed a complaint against anyone.

There are three other major players in the domestic fertilizer market that may be interested in gaining market share. Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis has a group of companies called Agrofert, which already has a fertilizer plant in Slovakia; The KITE integrator of OTP leader Sándor Csányi, which achieves an annual turnover of HUF 300 billion; and Lőrinc Mészáros, which expands into the agricultural sector through a wheat starch and isoglucose factory and constantly increases its influence in this sector.

Although their passion for hunting is common, Csányi and Bige have been fierce business opponents for more than a decade. The head of the bank was once part of the structure of the fertilizer empire. Bige, a pharmaceutical chemist who moved to Transylvania and began trading fertilizers with Romanian imports in the 1990s, bought the two large Hungarian factories with a loan from OTP (Szolnok in 1997, Pétit in 2002) and the bank’s representatives initially they managed the factories. also participated. However, a decade later, in 2008, for reasons that are not yet clear, the relationship between them deteriorated and the OTP stopped lending to Grupo Bige, putting the businessman in trouble. Bige’s empire was saved by the Gyurcsány government, with a loan from the state bank MFB. He can hardly count now on the benevolence of power. Although Bige has always proven to be a skilled crisis manager, and based on his business dealings, he would never ditch his companies, but in his NER system, he opposes, as those who know him say, “don’t rub against politics.”



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