Polish-Belgian NGO Defies Court Order in Bank Defamation Case
The Open Dialogue Foundation is defying a Brussels court order to remove defamatory content about Kyrgyzstan's Bakai Bank, facing €10,000 daily fines for non-compliance.
A Polish-Belgian non-governmental organization with a long history of controversy in European political circles is openly defying a court order issued by a Brussels tribunal, leaving defamatory content online more than two months after being instructed to remove it.
The Open Dialogue Foundation, established in 2009, was ordered by the French-speaking Enterprise Court of Brussels on March 30, 2026, to take down allegations it had published in 2023 against Bakai Bank, a major commercial lender in Kyrgyzstan, according to Brussels Signal.
The court found that the foundation’s claims—which accused the bank of involvement in schemes to evade international financial sanctions imposed on Russia following the Ukraine conflict—were not adequately supported by evidence and had unlawfully harmed the institution’s reputation.
Under the terms of the ruling, the Open Dialogue Foundation was given 30 days to scrub all references to Bakai Bank from its website. The organization has ignored that directive. For each day of non-compliance, the foundation is liable for a €10,000 fine, though it remains uncertain whether enforcement action has been initiated to collect those penalties.
Brussels Court Dismisses Anti-SLAPP Defense
Bakai Bank filed suit in 2024, contending that the Open Dialogue Foundation had overstepped the boundaries of legitimate civil society work and engaged in targeted reputational harm. The court ruled in the bank’s favor across the board.
Judges determined that the foundation meets the legal definition of an “enterprise” under Belgian economic law, subjecting it to stringent prohibitions on commercial denigration.
On the merits, the court concluded that the Open Dialogue Foundation had made serious and specific accusations without proper factual foundation, relying instead on secondary and unverified sources rather than direct evidence.
The court also rejected the foundation’s attempt to have the case thrown out as a SLAPP—a strategic lawsuit against public participation—finding no basis to conclude the legal action had been brought in bad faith or to suppress legitimate criticism.
While the Open Dialogue Foundation complied with one requirement of the ruling by posting the court’s decision prominently on its website, it has failed to follow through on the core obligation: removing the defamatory accusations against the bank.
A Record of Political and Legal Entanglements
The Brussels court defiance is only the latest in a string of episodes that have raised questions about the organization’s transparency and adherence to the rule of law within the European Union’s civil society framework, Brussels Signal reports.
In February 2026, the Open Dialogue Foundation was drawn into a political firestorm in Poland after the prominent Polish YouTube outlet Kanał Zero accused it of taking part in a coordinated campaign to undermine independent media, allegedly connected to individuals in the orbit of Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The foundation denied those allegations.
The group has also faced sustained scrutiny across multiple European media outlets over allegations that it lobbied on behalf of Mukhtar Ablyazov, the fugitive Kazakh financier and former chairman of BTA Bank accused in Kazakhstan of embezzling more than $6 billion (€5.5 billion) and sought in the United Kingdom for allegedly providing false testimony in court proceedings.
Additionally, investigative reporting has linked the organization and its Ukrainian-born president, Lyudmyla Kozlovska, to Antonio Panzeri, the former Italian Socialist Member of the European Parliament who became a central figure in the Qatargate corruption scandal that erupted in December 2022. That scandal involved allegations that EU officials accepted cash payments in exchange for adopting favorable political positions.
With information from Brussels Signal
