Orbán’s oil funded thinktank is murky on transparency

This summer German broadcaster ZDF published a documentary exposing the network of far right conservative organisations that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has set up to export his authoritarian politics. Among the institutions covered were Megafon (which trains new far right young influencers to dominate social media) and MCC Brussels, Orbán's Brussels-based thinktank.

MCC Brussels is part of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a wealthy organisation that runs universities with hardline conservative politics in Hungary, Austria and Slovakia, with plans for further expansion. Led by an Orbán advisor, the wealth of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium stems from an endowment of more than €1.3 billion from the Hungarian state in 2021. The endowment included real estate as well as a 10 per cent stake in the state-owned oil and gas company MOL. ZDF reports that the dividends from the MOL shares delivered MCC as a whole a whopping €50 million in income last year. As 65 per cent of MOL's oil is from Russia, ZDF points out, this means Russian oil profits are used to spread Orbán's authoritarian political agenda. It is unclear what share of this budget MCC Brussels enjoys given a lack of transparency by the organisation, as we shall see. 

MCC Brussels was launched two years ago under the leadership of Frank Furedi who has a background in a bizarre UK-based sectarian network around the magazines Living Marxism and Spiked, made up of former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party whose contrarians have gone on to successfully promote pro-corporate ultra-libertarianism and staunch anti-environmentalism for decades in British politics and media. According to Politico, “nearly all of MCC Brussels’ non-Hungarian staffers hail from that group”. 

In addition to hosting events attacking so-called "gender ideology", "cancel culture", and other far right obsessions, MCC Brussels publishes reports and hosts debates on EU policy issues, promoting Orbán's political agenda. But this is not just a traditional thinktank, as became clear during the farmers' protests earlier this year when MCC Brussels worked to connect farm protest leaders and far right politicians. This was part of a whole range of MCC Brussels activities to frame the protests into a far-right narrative focused on attacking EU Green Deal policies (intended to protect environment and health). In reality the farmers’ protest included a broad range of demands, including ending the EU-Mercosur trade talks, a call for guaranteed livable income for farmers, and other progressive demands. 

Other policy topics MCC Brussels has weighed in on include migration, energy security, and the regulation of disinformation. In May 2024 it ran a 'climate science' forum in Brussels which featured a seemingly independent panelist attacking "climate scientism" – what went undisclosed that this 'climate skeptic's' organisation, the Climate Policy Institute (CPI) in Budapest, is also funded by MCC. Discussing such events Frank Furedi told Politico: “The battle of the ideas has just begun”. 

What kind of budget does MCC Brussels have for promoting Orbán’s agenda in the EU capital? The EU Transparency Register unfortunately fails answer this question. The register obliges all organisations working to influence EU policy-making to disclose key information. Unfortunately MCC Brussels is using a loophole to escape public scrutiny of their budget. MCC Brussels has been active at least since November 2022 (see inaugural event), but almost two years later still doesn't disclose any meaningful financial information in the Transparency Register. When they joined the register in January 2024, MCC Brussels stated they're a "Newly formed entity, no financial year closed." According to the Transparency Register guidelines, MCC Brussels can choose the option of defining themselves as ‘Newly formed entity’ for the first two years of their registration. This means they could get away with avoiding disclosing financial information until January 2026 – more than three years after they started organising activities in Brussels aimed to influence EU decision-making! This is clearly unacceptable. 

Mouthpieces of authoritarian governments like MCC Brussels should be obliged to disclose key financial information, including sources of funding. The loophole used by MCC Brussels is yet another example of the need for a far stricter rules and the need for better enforcement of the Transparency Register. We have informed the Transparency Register secretariat of this situation and urged them to review the guidelines to close the loophole used by MCC Brussels.

Our quest for clarity around MCC Brussels and their budget for spreading Orban’s far right agenda brought us to the Belgian government’s Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (CBE). Organisations registered under Belgian law need to deposit their statutes and an annual (financial) report with the CBE. We found MCC Brussels’ statutes, but no annual reports have been submitted. We found a modification to MCC Brussels’ registration under Belgian law (as an international nonprofit organisation) from September 2023, in which the organisation was transferred to four employees at BDO Advisory SRL, the Belgian hub of a global business consultancy firm which works across many issues including risk advisory and cybersecurity. We have contacted BDO to ask for an explanation; as of the publication date we have received no comment. 

Given Hungary's current six month Presidency of the European Union – already being used as a showcase for Orbán's Trumpist vision to supposedly "Make Europe Great Again" and 'save' the Western world from the "woke virus" – whatever that is – it is worth putting extra scrutiny on MCC Brussels and its activities. 

UPDATE: In response to our questions, BDO Belgium stated that "the relationship with MCC is solely that of a client and supplier." "There is no legal or financial connection between BDO and MCC. Our employees have solely acted as specific (ad hoc) proxy holders to:

- represent the client at the notary public office and sign, in the name and on behalf of the client, the memorandum of association (actually the incorporation deed);

- oversee the publication formalities of the client, e.g. sign the publications forms in the name and on the client’s behalf and file these with the clerk’s office of the commercial court in order to ensure their publication into the annexes to the Belgian Official Gazette."