Last week, somebody sent a fake news story, cleverly written in the style of the Bloomberg news agency, claiming that Somali pirates wanted to invest their ill-gotten gains in buying up troubled Citibank.

Suddenly it seemed almost believable that the pirates would receive a credit upgrade from the big rating agencies, and that the pirates would indeed make a humiliating 10 cent offer for one of the world's largest banks.

"Maybe you aren't pleased with our offer, but we don't normally pay anything. You should be happy that we're giving anything at all for the shares," said the pirates' spokesman, Sugule Ali. One pirate told a newswire: "We're not pirates, more a kind of coastguard, and this investment means we'll be better able to carry out our tasks." It was funny, but not so unreal in a Hungarian context.

We haven't had a sea in Hungary for some time, but pirates have not been put off from coming here by a lack of coastline. Over the past 20 years, they've been feasting of us. We didn't have oil tankers, but we did have lots of state property and a very weak state which offered an ocean of possibilities. It wasn't hard work, either - barely a shot was fired. Privatisations, petrol bleaching, IT and other tenders, roadbuilding, housing associations, EU funding - just to name a few of the more prominent bits of piracy. The loot was horded up everywhere from Cyprus to the Cayman Islands.

After the happy 1990s, we're now seeing the coastguard make further progress. The former clients are taking off their slightly bloody clothes and buying elegant suits, playing the role of respectable coastguards and bringing their wealth back home. There's so much money around that it's no longer possible to buy a summer house in Croatia, Marbella or Mallorca. (Maybe the tax authorities could afford a budget air ticket to look into all those Hungarians with properties in those areas?)

The money is being invested in Hungary or in the ethnic-Hungarian areas of neighbouring countries. What else could happen to those thousands of billions of forints - what better fate for the Ft153bn stolen from Postabank, the sums missing from K&H Bank or the Ft1bn stolen for each kilometer motorway built?

We can't be sure about it, but it's worth asking whether the money behind the purchase of Ferencvaros's football stadium is 100 per cent British, especially when we discover that Andras Szasz, a name remembered from the Postabank affair, is involved in the transaction.

The K&H affair showed us how this all works. You park the money with offshore companies, and then invest it in buildings in Hungary and Romania (hotels, shopping centres) - in fact the money is often invested by the very same companies that are suspected of having syphoned it off in the first place. There's no end to these "foreign" investors.

But now these transactions have reached a new level, one which makes the Somali pirates look like small time players. Hungary's pirates are buying not Hungary, but Hungarian sovereign bonds. Strangely, even as the political parties war with each other, one proposal enjoys support from all five parties. It would turn the state itself into a vehicle for money laundering. A proposed change to tax laws would allow offshore companies to claim a 75 per cent tax discount on purchases of government bonds, so long as the owners held on to them for at least two years. In return for this "noble gesture," APEH would not investigate, and nor would anybody initiate a criminal investigation.

EU require that no discounts be available on revenues from criminal acts, but of course Hungary's criminal justice system has rarely handed down convictions in the kind of cases described above.

András Mózer