István Kapitány, a former high-ranking executive at the British multinational oil and gas company Shell, is the most prominent figure in Hungarian business life to join opposition candidate Péter Magyar’s campaign team. Since earlier this month, he has been serving as the Tisza Party’s senior financial and energy expert.
However, the Hungarian political magazine and news site Mandiner has recently uncovered that high-profile ‘signing’ comes with quite a baggage.
The publication claims that Kapitány’s company, Shell, has made massive profits since the outbreak of the Russo–Ukrainian war. The oil giant has brought in $5–20 billion more in revenue from 2022 to 2024, the latest available annual data, than in the years prior.
What makes the situation worse for Tisza is that, at a recent TV appearance, Kapitány has advocated for ‘diversifying’ Hungary’s energy imports and decreasing the volume of oil and natural gas coming into the country from Russia.
‘While Kapitány has been speaking on an increasing number of platforms about Hungary’s need to break away from Russian gas and oil, it has emerged that the Russo–Ukrainian war has generated huge extra profits and additional revenue for his former company, Shell…In the so-called “shock year” of 2022, the company more than doubled its profits compared to the previous year,’ Mandiner wrote in their exposé piece about the new Tisza finance and energy adviser.
By ‘the shock year of 2022’, they are referring to the massive increase in energy prices across the world, brought on in large part by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of that year.
Related articles:
