Vona: Kovacs Espionage Case Attempt To Weaken Jobbik

Budapest, May 19 (MTI) – There is a base and all-too-obvious smear campaign to bring down the radical nationalist Jobbik party, the party’s leader Gabor Vona said on Monday, after attending a hearing on espionage allegations targeting MEP Bela Kovacs.

Vona said after a closed-door meeting of parliament’s national security committee that the timing of the accusations was suspect.

He insisted that US Vice President Joe Biden had asked Prime Minister Viktor Orban to weaken Jobbik, adding it was “strange” that if investigations into Kovacs’s alleged activities had started in 2009 the case was only just emerging before the European elections.

Kovacs was accused of spying for Russia against the European Union in an article in Thursday’s issue of Magyar Nemzet. The paper said the Constitution Protection Office had filed a case against Kovacs for regularly conspiring with Russian diplomats and travelling to Moscow on a monthly basis. Kovacs is married to a Russian-Austrian dual citizen, who is ex-KGB, the paper said.

Kovacs, who is third on Jobbik’s EP candidate list, earlier denied the accusations: “I have never been a member of the Hungarian secret services or that of a foreign country, I never collaborated and I have never been contacted.”

Adam Mirkoczki, the committee’s member representing Jobbik, said he was not allowed to talk about what is discussed at national security meetings, as this information is classified, but he could say that he had not heard anything which would constitute a criminal act.

Photo: MTI – László Beliczay

Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters