Derivatives of the Seabee system, she and her sister ship, MV Yulius Fuchik, were built in the late 1970s by the Finnish state-owned shipbuilder Valmet in Vuosaari shipyard.

The ship was named for the Hungarian revolutionary Tibor Szamuely, who had a major role in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, her sister ship being called for the Czech Communist hero and martyr of the anti-Nazi Resistance Julius Fučík.

Tibor Szamueli and her sister ship were operated by Interlighter, a company founded in May 1978 by the governments of Bulgaria, Hungary, Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia with the sole purpose of transporting lighters without transshipment between the countries along the Danube river and the countries in South and South-East Asia.

They were mainly transported to the Mekong Delta, a voyage that took around 18 days, and pushed upstream as far as Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for unloading.

Occasionally, lighters were also carried to Karachi, Pakistan; Bombay, India; and Penang, Malaysia.