Hungarian police have seized thousands of pages of documents as evidence from the Ministry of Economy and Energy after the ministry, headed by István Kapitány, filed a criminal complaint about activities that had taken place during the previous government’s term, police announced on Tuesday. The information was uncovered following an audit of the Hungarian Export-Import Bank (Eximbank), prompting police to launch criminal proceedings alleging abuse of office and embezzlement. Previously, in July, Prime Minister Péter Magyar announced that the Ministry of Economy and Energy had filed criminal complaints relating to four previous deals:

• A case worth 59 billion forints (nearly €161 million) related to the Sofitel hotel, a company closely linked to the business interests of István Tiborcz, Viktor Orbán's son-in-law. Apparently, the bank had made a decision-in just two days-which violated even its own internal rules. A criminal complaint has been filed on suspicion of embezzlement and other criminal offenses.
• Another case, worth 126 billion forints (nearly €343,5 million), was related to an African project of the Hungarian company Duna Aszfalt. According to Magyar, on top of this, “they were also able to secure funding from the state-owned Hungarian Development Bank”.The project in question involved the construction of an expressway between Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
• The Dunakeszi Vehicle Repair Company’s project in Egypt was another one. Here, the Egyptian state railway company was granted a 176 billion forint (almost €480 million) loan from the Hungarian state.
• The fourth case concerns a 1 billion euro general-purpose loan granted to North Macedonia.

Should a company fail to comply with the rules within four months, it risks fines of up to six percent of its annual global revenue.

Ex-Breitbart editor has vocally supported immediate deportations for anyone who can’t prove US residency

For people outside Austria: Sebastian Kurz was Austria’s chancellor and led the conservative ÖVP into a government with the far right FPÖ.
His political career ended after major corruption investigations and he resigned in 2021.

Since then, Kurz has moved into business. He co founded the Israeli cybersecurity company Dream with former NSO Group CEO Shalev Hulio and reportedly owns almost 15 percent of the company.
He also has connections to Peter Thiel, Israeli politicians, Gulf states and still keeps contact with Austria’s right wing FPÖ.

The interesting question is how a former chancellor built such a large international business network only a few years after leaving politics.

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou tells MEE that Israeli investors are fueling the housing crisis in Athens.

Kiriakou explains that these investors are converting residential buildings into largely vacant tourist accommodations, which drives up real estate prices and makes it increasingly difficult for local residents to afford housing in the capital.

Two of Germany’s most senior politicians have called for their country’s top court to consider banning parts of the far-right Alternative for Germany.

Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defence minister, and Cem Özdemir, leader of the state of Baden-Württemberg, said the constitutional court should be asked to consider outlawing the AfD in four eastern states. 

The AfD party branches in Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg were dominated by ethnonationalist figures who viewed “true Germans” as people with “the right blood, the right pedigree, and the right convictions”, Pistorius and Özdemir said in a joint article for the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung.

“They don’t want a better democracy; they want to bring democracy to an end,” they added, as they called for the “prompt initiation” of legal proceedings to consider outlawing the AfD in the four states. 

Their intervention comes ahead of a critical election in the small state of Saxony-Anhalt on September 6 that could result in the AfD taking control of a German regional government for the first time. 

Polls suggest the party will win at least 40 per cent of the vote in the state of 2mn people, which was once part of the communist East Germany. That puts the AfD close to being able to take power in the state, in what would be the most far-right German regional administration since the end of the Third Reich.

Experts say that the court process to consider an AfD ban would take at least two years.

But the intervention by two of Germany’s most senior and popular politicians reflects growing concern about the continued rise of a party that has called for mass deportations of migrants, wants to quit the euro and has close ties to Russia — a stance that Pistorius and Özdemir described as a security risk. 

The AfD is ahead in national opinion polls, with support at around 28 per cent, and in recent months has increased its lead over Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-right Christian Democrats.

Germany’s postwar constitution was designed to try to ensure that a figure like Adolf Hitler could never rise to power again.

It describes the country as a “vigilant democracy” and equips it with the tools to enforce that status, including a mechanism to ban political parties.

Last year, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, whose mandate includes monitoring domestic extremism, officially classified the entire AfD as rightwing extremist. 

That unleashed a national debate about launching legal proceedings for a ban, which can only be triggered by the federal government or one of the two chambers of parliament. The constitutional court then assesses the merits of the case and decides. 

Merz and many other senior members of his party have voiced deep scepticism about the wisdom of outlawing a party. The chancellor warned last year that it “smacks too much of eliminating a political competitor.”

Pistorius, a member of the centre-left Social Democrats, and Özdemir, a Green, are not the first figures from their parties to call for a ban.

But their seniority and the forceful nature of their argument — as well as its timing — makes it one of the most significant interventions in favour of prohibition.

Pistorius and Özdemir said that they wanted to distinguish between the German nationalist wing of the AfD, which they saw as “extremely dangerous” but still sometimes compatible with the constitution, and the most radical ethnonationalist flank of the party that should be banned.

They said that the hurdles for outlawing any party were rightly very high and that the concept was alien to many other countries.

But Pistorius and Özdemir added that Germany’s dark history made party bans “a central instrument of our resilient democracy”.

“Our predecessors in the late 1920s could not have known what would happen, the catastrophe that the Nazis would create for Germany and the entire world, and how many millions of innocent people would be killed and murdered,” they said. “We do not have that excuse.”

A spokesperson for the AfD leadership did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

René Springer, chair of the party in the state of Brandenburg, said: “Anyone who wants to ban the strongest opposition force is not afraid for democracy, but afraid of democracy.”

The Bundeswehr is pursuing a number of other major procurement programmes for main battle tanks, artillery systems, and air defences.

Moscow recruits an estimated 1,000 people a day but western officials say it cannot keep up with casualty level

Russia’s war spending pushed the state to the brink of running out of cash this spring, according to a Bloomberg report that offers the clearest account yet of how the financial burden of the Ukraine invasion is straining Moscow’s finances.