Documents Uncover Orbán’s Funding of José Antonio Kast’s Far-Right Organization: Investigative Focus on Corruption

Documents Uncover Orbán’s Funding to the Far-Right Network Led by Kast

The Investigation Unit of El Mostrador has obtained official documents confirming funding from Viktor Orbán’s government to the Political Network for Values (PNfV), chaired by José Antonio Kast from 2022 to 2024. Records indicate that Hungary transferred 405 million forints to the entity between 2020 and 2024, equivalent to approximately $1,341,328 USD, as reported by journalist Claudio Pizarro Sanguesa. The majority of these funds, around $1,176,523, came in the year Kast took over as president of the international network, which is connected to the CPAC.

The details, sourced from the Hungarian Gazette and reports from the NGO itself, reveal a dramatic increase in funding in 2022, coinciding with the organization of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest. “The state cannot look the other way,” warned Juan José Lyon, executive director of América Transparente, demanding transparency regarding the final use of the funds. “If our authorities choose silence in the face of international opacity, they renounce their duty to protect internal integrity,” Lyon asserted, while researcher Cristóbal Rovira raised concerns about the potential financing of political campaigns stemming from these transnational connections.

This revelation, dubbed the “Hungarian papers,” comes at a time of heightened political tension in Europe, where Hungary’s new Prime Minister, Péter Magyar, has announced a criminal investigation into the CPAC and its satellite organizations, including the PNfV. “Mixing party funding with public budget spending is, in my opinion, a crime,” Magyar declared two weeks ago, as reported by the media. The European Union, which has frozen €17 billion in funds to Hungary due to a lack of transparency, supports these inquiries.

In Chile, despite Law 18.603 prohibiting foreign funding for political campaigns, the government has not yet responded to questions regarding the use of these resources when Kast was leading the organization. A group of deputies from the Frente Amplio has already requested a Special Investigative Commission (CEI) in Congress. “We need to see if this situation violated Hungarian funding laws and if the money was distributed elsewhere,” stated analyst Gilberto Aranda from the Institute of International Studies at the University of Chile to El Mostrador.

While former minister Juan Gabriel Valdés had already warned the same media about the need to “investigate where the far-right funds are coming from,” the Hungarian police have begun freezing assets of oligarchs close to Orbán. The Investigation Unit of El Mostrador attempted to gather responses from the PNfV and the Chilean government before publication, but received no reply. The “zero hour” of the Orbán files, as this media outlet anticipated, has begun.

Read the full publication at the following link from El Mostrador