Hungarian Sovereignty Protection Office flags another dangerous organization allegedly serving US Interests

Hungary’s Ökotárs Foundation is “the local distribution centre” of the “political pressure network”, the Sovereignty Protection Office said on Monday.

The office’s statement said the Ökotárs 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, Ökotárs 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 office said that most of Ökotárs’s revenues today come from funds allocated by the European Commission, 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 Hungarian Sovereignty Protection Office said Anna Donáth, 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 Ökotárs 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 Átlátszó and news outlet 444 had also received “significant amounts of money”.