Hungary Orders a Review Into Abolishing Its Own Gambling Regulator

A government resolution published on 31 August instructs the justice minister to report by 30 September on whether the SZTFH can be wound up and its powers moved into government-run bodies. The regulator says it answers to Parliament, not to ministers.

• Hungarian government resolution 1277/2026, published in the Magyar Közlöny on 31 August, orders an examination of the Supervisory Authority for Regulated Activities, the SZTFH, including what would be required to terminate it
• Justice Minister Márta Görög has until 30 September to report back on the feasibility of winding the authority up and transferring its tasks to bodies directed by government
• The SZTFH regulates gambling alongside tobacco and mining, and its removal would redistribute oversight of several sectors at once
• The review follows scrutiny of a casino concession granted to CAI Hungary Kft, linked to businessman István Garancsi, which the SZTFH's own public register shows running to 13 January 2061 and which was reported not to have gone to public tender
• The SZTFH says it is an independent body established by Parliament, subject only to legislation and accountable to Parliament alone, and that it will cooperate with the review

A New Government Examines an Authority It Inherited

Resolution 1277/2026 appeared in the Magyar Közlöny, Hungary's official gazette, on 31 August. It instructs the government to examine how the SZTFH's operation might be reviewed and the relevant legal provisions reconsidered, with the stated aim of clarifying what regulatory arrangements would allow the authority to be terminated or its tasks transferred to entities under government direction. Justice Minister Márta Görög, in post since 13 May, must report to the government by 30 September.

The political context is not incidental. The SZTFH was built up under the previous administration, and this review is being run by the government formed after the April election, in which Péter Magyar's Tisza party took a parliamentary supermajority and ended sixteen years of Fidesz rule. Hungarian coverage has framed the review explicitly as the new government training its sights on an authority favoured by the old one.

The SZTFH's remit is unusually broad. It supervises gambling, tobacco retail and mining, so abolishing it would not be a gambling reorganisation but a redistribution of regulatory power across several sectors simultaneously.

The proximate trigger appears to be a casino concession. Scrutiny has focused on a licence held by CAI Hungary Kft, a company connected to the businessman István Garancsi, which according to the SZTFH's own public register runs until 13 January 2061, and which was reported to have been granted without a public tender.

The authority has responded rather than stayed silent. It says it is an independent regulatory body established by Parliament, subject only to legislation in the conduct of its activities and accountable solely to Parliament for its operations, and that it will cooperate with the minister named in the resolution and conduct the examination in accordance with the law.

The Sequence Is a Warning About Where Concessions Are Awarded

Whatever the merits, the shape of this is becoming familiar. A long, high-value concession is awarded without competitive tender, the award is questioned, and the questioning does not stop at the concession but reaches the body that granted it. In Brussels this week an administrative court suspended a €750 million casino concession partly because the awarding authority could not show how it had reasoned. In Budapest the response is more drastic: not the award reviewed, but the regulator's existence. Operators holding long concessions in either market should read both cases as the same lesson, which is that a licence is only as durable as the procurement that produced it, and a 35-year term awarded without tender is an invitation to exactly this.

Independence Is Being Tested in Both Directions

The SZTFH's defence is the correct one on paper: a regulator established by statute, answerable to Parliament, is not supposed to be dismantled at ministerial convenience. But that argument cuts both ways here, because the criticism of the authority is precisely that it exercised its independence to award a 35-year concession without competition. A regulator that wants to be judged by its statutory independence has to be able to show that its discretionary decisions were defensible, and the Sopron concession is the test case. Meanwhile the government's proposed remedy, moving those powers to bodies under government direction, would replace an independent regulator with a directed one, which is not obviously an improvement in accountability terms. Hungary is arguing about the wrong end of the problem: the fix for a bad award is a better tender process, not a shorter chain of command.

Licence Holders Have Four Weeks of Uncertainty and Then More

For anyone operating under a Hungarian licence, the practical position is that the supervising authority may not exist in its current form, and the answer arrives no earlier than 30 September, when the minister reports. Even then a report is not legislation. Reorganisations of this kind take months, and during them applications slow, enforcement priorities drift and the people who understand the file leave. That is the real cost to a regulated market, and it lands on compliant operators first, because they are the ones who need the regulator to function. The regulatory map will look the same in Hungary on 1 October as it does today; how much it means may not.

A government has given itself four weeks to work out whether it can abolish its gambling regulator. Whatever it concludes, the authority has already been told what its political standing is.