Hungary’s government agreed to limit the number of people who could receive diplomatic immunity in Hungary as staff or guests of the International Investment Bank (IIB). Only one or two dozen of them would receive immunity, Direkt36 has learned. The bank relocated its headquarters from Moscow to Budapest this summer. This story was first published […]
With almost five hundred media outlets owned by a single pro-government foundation and hundreds of millions of euros of state advertising transferred annually to fund it, Hungary’s right-wing government has built Europe’s largest propaganda machine since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Warsaw follows in Budapest’s footsteps with a growing stream of taxpayers’ money funnelled […]
Attila Bátorfy
VSquare
Konrad Szczygieł
This article was originally published by Direkt36 on November 1st, 2019. Viktor Orban’s government has found itself in the middle of a great power conflict in 2019. Last year, a new battleground emerged in the trade war between the United States and China. Washington accused Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei of espionage on behalf of the […]
Huawei is at the center of heated political debate around the world. There is a general assumption among experts on China, ICT (Information and Communications Technology) experts and politicians that the company uses its ICT devices to spy on its users and provide this data to Chinese government. Though there have been separate cases of Huawei breaches […]
Early in the morning on January 8th, agents of the Polish Internal Security Agency entered the homes of Piotr D. and Wejing W. The former, who used to work in special services, was a manager at Orange, a telecommunications company. The latter was the head of sales at Poland’s Huawei’s office. They were charged with […]
Two years ago Azerbaijani army showed off Czech howitzers and rocket launchers in a promotional video — despite the fact Czech Republic did not officially export military equipment to the country. How the weapons end up in the country immersed in a deadly conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh?
Máté Hegedűs was walking on Deák tér, one of the busiest areas of Budapest recently. His long hair, his earring, flower-patterned shirt and colorful shoes made him stand out from the crowd. Someone suddenly shouted at him ’look, there goes a gay guy!’. He actually used a very vulgar expression. ’I don’t mind being stared […]
Anita Komuves
Many Western allies of Hungary are worried about Russia’s International Investment Bank (IIB) having moved its seat to Budapest. In the meantime the government of Hungary and IIB’s management are arguing that this is only a regular international bank and cannot even be categorized as ‘Russian.’ However, VSquare and its partners reveal how IIB’s head […]
The management board of the Russian-led International Investment Bank (IIB) held its first meeting in its new headquarters, Budapest, this week. The move of IIB from Moscow to Budapest has been controversial since it was announced: experts, historians and the media have been worried that the bank would be a tool for the Kremlin to […]
The parliamentary elections in the fall in Poland will be crucial. We’ve already seen in Hungary what eight years in power can mean both for the governing party and its loyalist structures and the opposition — says Zselyke Csaky form Freedom House in intervew with Vsquare
