Funding was given to an organization that is not subject to strict party funding laws.Continue reading
The deputy floor leader of Hungarian governing party Fidesz has filed a complaint with the National Tax and Customs Administration regarding the foreign campaign financing of the opposition coalition. In a video statement sent to MTI on Saturday, János Halász said that there are no fewer questions about the left’s campaign financing, although several authorities and secret services are currently conducting analytical and evaluative work.
The politician said the situation is not made any easier by the fact that Péter Márky-Zay, who was the opposition’s prime ministerial candidate, and other left-wing figures regularly get involved in controversies. At the beginning of the campaign, they kept quiet about the so called “rolling dollars”, then they talked about hundreds of millions, and finally the total amount of three billion forints was revealed, the Fidesz politician underlined.
He added that
the version of Péter Márky-Zay about micro-donations was refuted by their sponsor, Action for Democracy, linked to the chief adviser of the Mayor of Budapest, which admitted that institutional donors had also sent money to Hungary during the election campaign.
According to János Halász, the US based Action for Democracy donated HUF 1.8 billion (EUR 4.3 million) to the Everybody’s Hungary movement (MMM) led by Péter Marki-Zay and also sent significant sums to several recipients in Hungary. For example, DatAdat, an NGO linked to former socialist Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai, which provided the opposition campaign with a million people’s personal data, received HUF 148 million ((EUR 355,000) from the foreign organization.
János Halász also said that it was noteworthy that Márky-Zay’s movement had initiated transfers totalling HUF 1.4 billion (EUR 3.3 million) to DatAdat’s Austrian parent company, but had also given HUF 11.7 million (EUR 28,000) to the Hungarian company.
According to the politician, it is worth investigating what real, verifiable payments were made, as the absence of such payments could lead to well-founded suspicions of criminal activity, in particular budget fraud.
A few weeks ago, it came to light that during the spring election campaign in Hungary, opposition parties have received money from abroad for their campaigns. As it turned out, this was not a small amount of money, but the equivalent of around HUF 3 billion (EUR 7.2 million) from the United States.
Featured photo via Pixabay
