After three years, he gave an interview again and became close to the government Indexto Lőrinc Mészáros. One of Hungary’s richest men and Viktor Orbán’s childhood friend asked for the “ultra-liberal, almost communist slogan” that Hungarian entrepreneurs in Hungary “just get the jobs, they hand them out.”
“It’s not true, I’m asking this for myself, but I’m asking it on behalf of all Hungarian entrepreneurs. This is a misconception, a joke, the world does not work as if there is a joystick, and the money spigot is adjusted by who wants how much”
he said.
According to Mészáros, he and Orbán are friends, their friendship is based on trust, but “we are on separate paths, since the Prime Minister has been a politician since 1989, and I have been an entrepreneur since 1992”. Its economic development did not happen in two days, but “I got here with the work of the last 32 years”. “I have gone through all the stages of the entrepreneurial world, as I have been a small, medium and large entrepreneur. There were better and less good periods, but every day I subordinated everything to always being able to get at least one step ahead on my path”.
Orbán and he both work a lot, but their relationship is still relatively “intense”. “We could talk for days about sports, football, our ‘common child’, the Puskás Academy. Of course, family and children are also topics, politics is also discussed, we try to have lunch together when we have time. It’s not easy to get it together, because I have a lot to do, and he has even more.”
Lőrinc Mészáros also spoke about Péter Magyar. “Although he was a member of the supervisory board at our bank, I do not know Péter Magyar personally, nor do I interfere in his affairs. I only knew his name because he was Judit Varga’s ex-husband. He is on the political stage, I live on the economic stage, we have nothing in common. If someone’s topic is me, I don’t take it as an attack, not even in the case of László Pesty, who is otherwise a funny person. Maybe it’s their job to maintain the interest of the public, and for me it’s to make my companies as successful as possible.”
They also asked about his wife, Andrea Várkonyi, about whom he said, “One of my wife’s qualifications is a doctor, and although she has not been working as a doctor for quite some time, health care is close to her heart, she helps me a lot in this, she coordinates our health care businesses.” According to him, he also has useful insights in the field of communication and marketing, “which I always listen to, but since I’ve been in the business world for more than 30 years, he asks me for advice, he listens to me when I tell him what I think about a current situation, a task to be solved, which arises in the businesses he coordinates. We work well, I live in a happy, balanced marriage, which I think is the natural part of it.”
