Almost every day, new developments are coming to light about the issue of rolling dollars, after suspicions of double management recently arose on the dollar left. It is worth remembering that Péter Márki-Zay admitted in an interview that his movement was supported from abroad. Since then, the authorities have also started to investigate the case, while the left continues to deny that they received money from abroad.

The most serious campaign financing scandal of the past thirty years erupted when, last August, Péter Márki-Zay spoke out in the Magyar Hang Gulyáságyú podcast - or he consciously mentioned it - that the MMM he founded still in June, i.e. long after the parliamentary elections, had hundreds of received a million grant from the United States. As the former joint prime minister candidate of the left put it, they were able to pay "the last bills of the campaign" with the help of this. From his words, it became clear that the June grant came in a lump sum from the American foundation Action for Democracy, from which they had already received "three or four larger items" before.

The dollar left knows nothing

Action for Democracy is an NGO founded in the United States at the beginning of 2022, and its president and director is none other than Gergely Karácsony's city diplomatic adviser at the time, Dávid Korányi, who was also the chief adviser to Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai. Not long after, Péter Márki-Zay made public his movement's full account of the donations received.

Although it is not clear from whom exactly the sometimes astonishing sums came from, one thing is certain: through Action for Democracy, eight "macro-donations" worth a total of HUF 1.86 billion swelled MMM's account.

Meanwhile - and since then - the opposition parties behind Márki-Zay practically pretended that they were not even there in the campaign. The leader of the left, Ferenc Gyurcsány, then claimed to Hír TV that he was not aware of the foreign campaign subsidies referred to Péter Márki-Zay's movement, so his party did not use them either. The fallen prime minister insisted that the DK can account for the campaign funds to the State Audit Office.

Like Gyurcsány, Gergely Karácsony claimed to Hír TV that he did not know about the American money coming to MMM. – I know what has been published in the public about this, what the prime minister-designate said, and I know the official announcement of Action for Democracy in this regard. I know neither more nor less than that, the mayor insisted. According to his claim, even the former vice president of MMM did not know about the amazing campaign contributions coming to the organization from America.

Katalin Lukácsi told our newspaper at the time that she had not actively participated in the leadership of the MMM before April 3, but rather concentrated on "field work" in the campaign. He justified all this by saying that the organizational culture of the movement "left something to be desired", because Márki-Zay did not really involve the presidency in the work. According to him, he was only aware of the donations collected together with other left-wing parties in the country, primarily at various campaign events, which were always reported to the public. At the same time, Lukácsi stressed that Péter Márki-Zay, who is championing the fight against corruption, should pay twice as much attention to accounting and transparency as others. And the icing on the cake is that even though the news was initially about a 1.8 billion grant, the national security investigation launched into the case revealed that this amount actually totaled around three billion forints.

An unprecedented scandal

Even after the case broke out, Máté Kocsis, the faction leader of Fidesz, announced at a press conference held after the external faction meeting of the governing parties in September last year: they are initiating the National Security Committee of the Parliament to review the issue of foreign campaign support for left-wing parties. The documents made public for the National Security Committee revealed that even larger sums were deposited into the accounts of the campaign organizations of the dollar left than was previously known. On November 17 last year, the partial report was published, which proved that the left could have received HUF three billion from the United States. However, on January 25 of this year, it became clear that an even larger amount had arrived from the still-unknown group of final supporters.

It turned out that the amount disbursed by Korányi's Action for Democracy is approximately HUF 160 million higher than the balance of public transfers so far. The total amount received from this American organization is thus HUF 3.174 billion, of which 58 percent was received by Péter Márki-Zay's Everyone Hungary Movement, which, according to its own admission, spent part of the money at the beginning of 2023.

It can also be read from the second partial report prepared for the parliamentary committee that another important left-wing campaign organization, Oraculum 2020 Kft., the operator of the portal called EzaLényeg, in addition to the HUF 1.082 billion referred by Action for Democracy, obtained income of a similar magnitude from another source during the pre-election and during the election campaign. Between September 2021 and the end of February 2022, these five transfers totaled 887 million forints, which came from the coffers of a Swiss foundation to the company also belonging to Bajnai's circles.

New circumstances

At the beginning of March, László Windisch, the president of the State Audit Office (ÁSZ), announced at a meeting of the Economic Committee of the Parliament, where the investigation of the campaign funds used in the 2022 parliamentary election was also on the agenda: the ÁSZ cannot maintain the legally required result of over one percent in last year's election reached the deadline for monitoring party campaign expenses, after special and complex phenomena were found during the investigations. The president of the office said in his presentation on the state of control of campaign funds that circumstances were revealed during the control that fall under the competence of the National Tax and Customs Office, therefore the report of the SAO will not be ready by the deadline of April 8.

- From the audits, we can see that for the sums spent on the campaign, the Meninki Magyarországa Mozgalom (MMM) also commissioned a foreign business company with tasks that it also ordered at home, so the authenticity of the performance certificates raises the issue of double management

he emphasized.

Source: magyarnemzet.hu

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