The office’s statement said the Okotars Foundation had been “distributing funds and building networks” for foreign pressure groups in Hungary since 1994.

Most of the foundation’s revenues come from abroad, it said.

Initially, Okotars had received funding from American foundations like the Ford, Rockefeller and Soros Foundation via a central and eastern European network called the Environmental Partnership Association, and its financing model gradually changed following Hungary’s European Union accession, the statement said.

The majority of Okotars’s revenues today come from funds allocated by the European Commission, the office said, adding that the EC has earmarked 1.5 billion euros towards the “direct financing of political pressure groups” through its Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) scheme.

The Sovereignty Protection Office said Anna Donath, a former MEP of the opposition Momentum Movement, had played a key role in developing this financing model. Over the last two years, close to 18 million euros in CERV money has been transferred to Hungary, close to three-quarters of which had gone to “political pressure groups”, the office said.

The Okotars Foundation received 3.3 million euros from those funds, which it distributed among “organisations belonging to the foreign pressure network like Amnesty International Hungary, the Helsinki Committee, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (TASZ)”, the statement said, adding that investigative reporting outfit Atlatszo and news outlet 444 had also received “significant amounts of money”.

The office said Okotars had also distributed funds disbursed by the the US embassy in Budapest.

It said outgoing US Ambassador David Pressman had announced a call for applications for direct grants to “network actors” in the autumn of 2023, with the Okotars Foundation having been put in charge of distributing the funds.

More than 115 million forints (EUR 281,000) in US funding was distributed by January 2024 among outlets like Telex, Klubradio, Nyugat.hu, 444, Magyar Narancs, Atlatszo and Tilos Radio, it said.

The Sovereignty Protection Office said it wanted to alert state authorities to the “grave risk” it said “the Okotars Foundation and the network covering the entire region” posed to Hungary’s sovereignty.
 

Source: 
MTI - The Hungarian News Agency, founded in 1881.

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