Interactive feature: follow the luxury jet and the yacht used by the Hungarian governing elite

Tool

The watchdog NGO Atlatszo revealed in September that Viktor Orban and the political and economic elite close to the government are using a €56-million luxury jet and a €21-million yacht. The audience has been fascinated by the story of the luxury vehicles, thus the NGO has decided to build an online tool where anyone can track the yacht and the jet in real time.

Interactive feature image: travelmap

This article was originally published by Átlátszó.hu, a watchdog NGO and online newspaper in Hungary.

Since the publication of our first story, we have been tracking where the two vehicles are and covered them in different stories. The yacht, called Lady Mrd, has been anchored in Rijeka for months. The yacht is registered in Malta and is owned by a shell company – there is no data available about its owner. However, Orban’s good friend Lőrinc Mészáros has been seen on board and Atlatszo was able to connect Mészáros to the yacht.

The jet, registered in Austria as OE-LEM, has made several trips since our first story was published. We tracked it to London and to Belgrade. The plane flew to the Serbian capital only a day after former Macedonian prime minister Nikola Gruevski announced that he was asking for asylum in Hungary.

The movements of yachts and planes can be tracked online for free – but these tools might be slightly complicated to use.

Therefore we decided to build a user-friendly site that makes it easy for anyone to track where the favorite vehicles of the Hungarian governing elite are at the moment.

Clicking on the drop-down menu you can also pick a specific date which will show you where the vehicles were at that day. If you select a time range, our site will create a map of the movement of the yacht and the jet during that time.

Nertravel

Folyamatosan frissülő, naprakész nyilvántartás arról, hogy hol vannak most éppen a fideszes elit kedvenc luxusjárművei. A dátumokra kattintva megnézheted azt is, hogy merre jártak az elmúlt egy évben.

The site is titled NER Travel. The abbreviation NER refers to Nemzeti Együttműködés Rendszere, which means ’System of National Cooperation.’ This is a term created by the Orban government after its election victory in 2010, and they used it to refer to the changes in government that they were planning to introduce. Today the word NER, in colloquial Hungarian, means the Fidesz governing elite, complete with the politicians and the oligarchs profiting from it.

This article was originally published by Átlátszó.hu, a watchdog NGO and online newspaper for investigative journalism to promote transparency, accountability, and freedom of information in Hungary. More of their English articles can be accessed here.