The head of the capital, who has already started his campaign, is reviving: in many cases, he uses series of events financed from the budget of Budapest 150 to promote himself, but this is not enough for him, he would resort to the strange "micro-donations" again.
"I don't know what I'm going to campaign on now," said Gergely Karácsony, who believes in a revival, on the Partizán program, so he and his team are preparing to collect donations in a transparent manner. According to him, he needs "a strong civil base, an activist campaign that can win this election even without the active support of the parties".
In connection with the 526 million 99 Movement fundraiser created for his prime ministerial candidate campaign, he said that "it was a legal fundraiser in all respects, in Hungary you can collect donations anonymously using this method".
It is worth noting that, despite Karácsony's claims, the OTP recently filed a complaint against the 99 Movement, which is connected to the mayor, after it had paid tens of millions, and a total of half a billion forints, into its account at the financial institution in a short period of time.
The background of the case was that Gábor Perjés, the person in charge of financial affairs of the mayor, repeatedly handed over to the OTP minutes that referred to the opening of the already mentioned donation collection boxes.
After the news published in the press, the credit institution recently ordered an internal audit, and at the end of it, it made serious findings.
One of them is that, according to the records, the collection of donations is basically done from Hungarian persons living abroad for an approx. In a 30×30×30 centimeter donation collection box.
According to the Perjésék records, two to three thousand banknotes were pressed into them, and in one case 3,811 banknotes. According to the report, however, "packages of banknotes cannot be placed in the chest through the slot at the top, but at the same time it was established that the majority of the banknotes brought in - mainly euro banknotes - were new, wrinkle-free, in many cases consecutively numbered and stuck together (as if they had left the printing press and had not been used would have them)."
It does not seem feasible that natural persons donate only two denominations of euro banknotes, while natural persons donate the entire banknote row of forint banknotes.
Last, but not least, according to the complaint, the payments corresponded to the amount of the transfers to one of the prominent partners of the association (Bajnai's DatAdat group) immediately after the payment.
In connection with the case, Levente Tóth, the lead analyst of Bank360, also made a statement, according to whom it is not usual at all these days for someone to regularly deposit large sums of cash in the bank, unless they are engaged in business activities, for example primary producers. According to Tóth, the payment in itself is not illegal, but there is an anti-money laundering law that obliges banks to keep records in risky cases, so for example, they must keep track of the conditions of the payment.
The leading analyst pointed out that we can talk about money laundering when they try to launder some kind of illegal income, and it is the task of the investigating authorities to find this out.
"The point of donations is that I don't need to know who the donation is from," he added. As he said, this is a legal boundary that, after the investigation, the court must decide whether a violation has occurred or not.
On October 14, the mayor evaluated his past four years in the Merlin theater, all of which he did in front of the logo created for Budapest's 150th anniversary, which proves that it is not a party event, but a town hall event.
Zsolt Wintermantel, a member of the ruling party in the capital, did not leave the matter without a word. In many cases, Gergely Karácsony uses the series of events financed from the budget of Budapest 150 for his campaign, but the current annual review takes everything, Zsolt Wintermantel, the leader of the Fidesz-KDNP faction, told Magyar Nemzet.
For a few weeks, the mayor has been holding various events, such as the concert held at Lánchíd, where he used the festive event to build his own image. In addition, the capital city and its marketing company, Budapest Brand, organize many events that serve Karácsony's political activities.
