Mr. Miklós Ligeti:

I will write extensively to the committee on this issue later. The police raids and the unfriendly and hostile government audits of the operation and allocation of Norwegian civil society funding served as an excuse and a questionable legal ground to start a harassment campaign against those civil society organisations and NGOs which are recipients of such financial resources. These organisations - 13 of them, including TI Hungary - are virtually blacklisted and have been accused of being a tool for embezzlement and misuse of public funding. This is because this money was intended to enhance civil society and democracy, whereas the organisations receiving the funds are, from a government viewpoint, clearly not enhancing civil society and doing a job for democracy but representing the interests of foreign governments in exchange for funding. I do not know how clear I was, but the Hungarian Government virtually suggests that allocating Norwegian civil society funding to those very recipients in Hungary that receive the funding is in itself an embezzlement, because it is an arbitrary re-purposing or re-channelling of money intended for civil society to politically biased opposition-leaning organisations. This is my closing remark, and I am grateful to be here.