Does a recently declassified intelligence report prove the claim that Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony campaigned using foreign funds? No, that's not true: The report mentions foreign currencies but does not state that the money came from abroad.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published by David Filep on his TikTok channel @akopaszoszt on June 27, 2023, under the title (translated into English by Lead Stories staff) "500 million in foreign currency to Karacsony!" It opened (translated into English by Lead Stories staff):
You will loose your mind if I show you how did Karacsony receive his 500 million for campaigning!
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Jun 28 14:25:47 2023 UTC)
Filep's video claims that Karacsony denied he received campaign funds from abroad for his opposition primary election campaign in 2021, but that an intelligence report proves he did.
The National Information Center, the Hungarian intelligence service, wrote a report about foreign interference in the 2022 parliamentary elections that was declassified and uploaded to the Parliament's website on June 26, 2023. The report contains a short section (on page 19.) about the finances of Kilencvenkilenc Mozgalom Egyesület (Ninety-nine Movement Association), Karacsony's nongovernmental organization. Karacsony ran in the opposition's primary election as the representative of his movement and was supported by a few opposition parties.
The report found that in 2021 and 2022, Gabor Perjés, the president of the association, added more than 506 million Hungarian forints ($1.5 million) in cash to the association's bank account including euros and British pounds. The report does not mention the source of the funds and does not say it comes from abroad.
In his video Filep also claims that Perjés added 500 million forints in foreign currencies to the bank account of the Kilencvenkilenc Mozgalom Egyesület. However, the intelligence report clearly states that 917,695 euros (338,764,800 forints) and 3,900 British pounds (1,674,774 forints) was added to the account. The rest was in forints.
Karacsony reacted to the report in a Facebook post, highlighting that the report does not mention that the funds came from abroad. He wrote that these were legally collected donations in their locked donation boxes.
The association's financial reports are available on the Hungarian Courts' website. Their publicly available report says that they received 653,323,000 forints in 2021 and 2022.
Karacsony stepped back before the second round of the opposition's primary elections in 2021 and didn't run as the opposition's candidate in the 2022 parliamentary elections. Hungary will hold municipal elections in June 2024 and Karacsony already announced that he will run again for the Budapest mayor seat.
