George Soros hits out at Hungarian government

Billionaire businessman George Soros has spoken out against the "deeply troubling developments" in his native Hungary where the right-wing government has appropriated a photo of his face for a $12.9 million anti-immigration election campaign.

The billboard campaign casts Soros, a Jewish survivor of the Nazi occupation, as a supporter of illegal immigration, and runs with the slogan: "Let's not let Soros have the last laugh."

In a note issued on behalf of Soros Tuesday, the philanthropist, who has donated some $400 million to Hungary, condemned the campaign which he said was reminiscent of "Europe's darkest hours."

Soros is an advocate of helping developing countries cope with the growing migrant crisis and has said that Europe should accept "several hundred thousand fully-screened refugees through an orderly process of vetting and resettlement."

The campaign was launched last week and despite attracting widespread criticism for its perceived Nazi-era anti-Semitic messages, Soros had refrained from speaking publically on the issue.

As a survivor of the Holocaust who hid from the Nazis in Budapest and later was himself a refugee, Soros knows first-hand what it means to be in mortal peril," the note on Tuesday morning read.

"He carries the memory of the international community's rejection of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis … It is from the crucible of those experiences that his empathy for refugees from war-torn Syria and elsewhere was born," it adds.

Source: Bloomberg

Junior Trader Stefan Panteleev

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