Website for boycotting oligarchs gains traction

IT MAY be just one of many fashionable hotels in the Hungarian capital, but for anti-corruption activist Attila Juhasz, the Alice Hotel symbolises the capture of the tourism industry by an elite that has enriched itself under Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

“One of the owners is a commercial partner of (Orban’s son-in-law) Istvan Tiborcz,” Juhasz, a bearded 30-year-old in a yellow parka coat said.

To increase awareness Juhasz’s corruption watchdog, K-monitor, created a tourist guide with a difference – an interactive map, nerhotel.hu, that lists addresses to avoid in Budapest. It includes the Alice Hotel, housed in a neo-renaissance building on Budapest’s prestigious Andrassy boulevard, lined with 19th-century palaces.

According to Juhasz, the map lets people check if their tourist spending is flowing to “politically exposed figures”.

In three years more than 400 addresses have been added to the map, most located in parts of the historic centre of Budapest that form a Unesco World Heritage site.

Between 3 000 and 3 500 unique visitors view the map every month.

“People constantly ask us to check new addresses,” said Juhasz, adding that an English version was on the way. |