Investor Soros pledges new donation to pro-EU group - Guardian

Feb 11 (Reuters) - Billionaire financier George Soros will pledge an additional 100,000 pounds ($138,130) to Best for Britain, a campaign group seeking to keep Britain in the European Union, the Guardian reported on Sunday.

Soros, who donated 400,000 pounds to the campaign last week, is to make a new donation after attacks against him in the right-wing press, the Guardian said.

"I am happy to take the fight to those who have tried to use a smear campaign, not arguments, to prop up their failing case," Soros told the newspaper. http://bit.ly/2BnLRH6

The investor's Open Society Foundation (OSF) will match a crowdfunding campaign set up in the wake of attacks on Soros, which has already raised more than 50,000 pounds ($69,065.00)since last week, the Guardian said.

Best for Britain and the Open Society Foundation could not be immediately reached for comment on the report.

Soros, best known in Britain for earning billions betting against the pound in the early 1990s, is the target of a hostile media campaign by the nationalist government in his native Hungary and a hate figure for right-wing campaigners in eastern Europe and the United States.

The Daily Telegraph newspaper, which first reported Soros's involvement with Best for Britain last week, said the 87-year-old former hedge fund manager was backing a "secret plot" to stop Brexit. The article was written by Nick Timothy, a former chief of staff to Prime Minister Theresa May.

May's office repeated its long-standing position that the decision to leave the EU in 2019 after a vote in 2016 was final and would not be reversed. It had also defended the right of campaign groups to accept donations. ($1 = 0.7240 pounds) (Reporting by Abinaya Vijayaraghavan in Bengaluru; Editing by Alistair Bell)