As is known, on April 18, Ráhel Orbán signed two sales contracts for a total of 94 hectares of land in the Tokaj Wine Region in north-eastern Hungary. For a while, the question persisted whether a local landowner (in Hungary, owners of adjacent properties have pre-emption rights when selling a given landed property) or perhaps the state would exercise their right of pre-emption and prevent the Prime Minister’s daughter from acquiring ownership at least for parts of the total area in question. This issue was also referred to in Ráhel Orbán’s response to us back in June.
Later, we inquired several times with Ráhel Orbán’s team to see if any of those entitled to pre-emption had exercised the right, but we would receive no more answers. Therefore, we took it upon ourselves to uncover whether the Orbán family had succeeded in the acquisition, focusing on the more valuable estates. For the twelve most expensive estates (the contract divided the 142 properties with distinct parcel numbers into property groups, in reality comprising a total of 73 different properties), no one had expressed a pre-emption claim, so the respective land authorities eventually registered Ráhel Orbán’s ownership.
The state did not exercise its pre-emption right either, and, in fact, at the end of May, entries of the state’s registered pre-emption rights were removed from the property registers of certain properties among those newly acquired by Ráhel Orbán in the Tokaj Wine Region Historic Cultural Landscape, constituting an UNESCO World Heritage Site. These pre-emption rights were originally registered on properties within World Heritage areas two government cycles earlier, based on a proposal by then-Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén.