Hungary’s party financing laws have for long failed to provide the transparency needed for a level playing field. Just a few months before the spring elections the country’s Supreme Court raised the possibility that some parties which do not receive state subsidies may even have broken the law, national daily Nepszabadsag reported on Tuesday.
Prosecutors throughout the country are examining whether a failure to publish financial data or other discrepancies may have criminal repercussions.
The radical nationalist Jobbik party has been singled out as one of the parties with shortcomings in this area, though there are said to be many other organisations failing to comply, the paper said.
After the court started examining the issue, Jobbik, failing to publish relevant data since 2004, in December last year released the information for the past five years. The party declared 10 million forints (EUR 37,000) in revenues for the past five years, a figure which many see as unrealistic, given that the party has managed to send three representatives to European Parliament, the paper said.
As under current laws the State Audit Office only has the right to examine the validity of existing documents and has no authority to look deeper into finances, parties are not sanctioned for publishing faulty data.
But the question remains – said the paper – how parties can be spending up to 3 billion forints on their election campaigns when most of them claim to be just breaking even or even being in the red in their books.
