Let’s finish out the week with some cheerful/appalling recent news about companies that for one reason or another seem to have a lock on particular juicy tenders. First up is this story in last Friday’s Világgazdaság, from which we learned that only one party has submitted a bid for a €1.5 billion concession to build the controversial King’s City casino complex near Lake Velence. According to the piece, which is based on reporting by opposition-friendly Magyar Hírlap, the sole bidder is one KC Bidding Kft, which was registered with merely Ft 600,000 in capital last December, and is owned by Czech Republic-based American Chance Casinos and Vigotop, an offshore company headquartered in Cyprus.
The project was recently in the news after it was reported that the Hungarian National Asset Management Company (MNV) had swapped the plot for the planned complex for an orchard owned by an Israeli-American, a shady little deal that was apparently one of the last straws leading to the sacking of MNV head Miklós Tátrai. Unsurprisingly, the project is in line for billions of forints in state subsidies.
The result of the tender, which is apparently being run by the Finance Ministry, is scheduled to by announced by August 18, and it doesn’t take much to guess who is most likely to win it.