If you live in Budapest, and you feel engaged in the local community, you can vote on the 13th of October in the local elections. A lot of people living here are not Hungarians and therefore might not speak the language and do not understand much of what’s going on during the campaign. To help them,…

Hungary’s current whistleblower act came into force on 1 January, 2014. The present article intends to give a brief overview on how the reshaped regulation was implemented and used in public interest disclosures during the past five years. The rarity of cases in which the new legislation has been…

We were the first one to report on the Prime Minister’s trip to a Videoton-Ludogorec Champion’s League game in Bulgaria on July 25. The trip was made on a 60 million dollar business jet, and Orbán’s Press Secretary, Bertalan Havasi asserted that it has not been paid from public funds. In September,…

Summer holiday at Lake Balaton? Charming autumn city break in Budapest? Be aware that the corrupt clientele of the Orbán regime is branching out to tourism. They own hotels and restaurants around the most popular destinations. Don’t feed kleptocrats and don’t support oligarchs usurping both…

As part of the 2017 Global Legislative Openness Week K-Monitor did some experimenting with parliamentary data. Background: K-Monitor started to scrape data from the Hungarian Parliament's website to make it processable for researchers and easily searchable for citizens and journalists. The following…

The Seventh Session of the Conference of the States Parties to the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC/COSP7) starts today in Vienna. K-Monitor has applied for an observer role, however a state vetoed our participation.

The positions of the green barons obtained at the turn of the millennium are gradually, hectare by hectare, company by company, taken over by the orange barons in Hungarian agriculture according to the latest agricultural subsidy data processed by K-Monitor. In light of the payments and ownership…

A delegation of the EP Committee on Budgetary Control is now visiting Hungary, planning a trip to see the Felcsút miniature railway that has eaten of HUF 600 million. We have to recognize however, that this country can offer a lot more than just a ghost train in the Prime Minister’s village. Have…

Hungary announced to leave the Open Government Partnership on Tuesday, only one day before the start of the OGP Summit in Paris. Here is a short summary on how we got there. Hungary joined OGP in 2012 after local NGOs suggested this during the development of Hungary’s National Anti-Corruption…

Interactive corruption risk profile for the biggest public spenders Since its deployment in late 2015, redflags, our online watchdog system has combed through almost 16.000 public procurement documents. The time has come to create the redflag-profiles of those contracting authorities that have…