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Foreign companies in Hungary complain of growing pressure from the authorities [1]

['Jean-Baptiste Chastand', 'Vienna', 'Austria', 'Correspondent']

Date: 2024-08-25

In Hall 2A of Budapest airport, sold by the German company AviAlliance to the Hungarian government in early June, on July 9, 2024. MARTON MONUS / REUTERS

Never before has the boss of a foreign company operating in Hungary spoken so openly. In March, Hans K. Reisch, heir and owner of the Austrian branch of the SPAR supermarket chain, denounced the Hungarian authorities' "harassment" of his subsidiary, which operates over 600 stores in the Central European country. In an interview with the German retail trade magazine Lebensmittel Zeitung, he claimed that an unnamed close associate of Prime Minister Viktor Orban was also trying to "appropriate [his] company."

"We were told in a rather daring way that if the state had a stake in our company, things would go more smoothly," he said in the Austrian daily Die Presse, denouncing the 4.5% tax on supermarket sales raised in 2022 by Viktor Orban's nationalist government in the name of the fight against superprofits, and which surprisingly only targets non-Hungarian supermarket chains. Multiple administrative measures were also put into place to control prices and inventories that made its subsidiary, which posted a loss of over €46 million in 2023, "economically unviable."

In return, the Hungarian government came under heavy attack. "SPAR prefers to spread untruths rather than take measures to restore its competitiveness," for example, criticized Hungarian Economy Minister Marton Nagy, while Orban filed a personal defamation suit against all Hungarian media that dared to repeat Reisch's statements. This rare act on the part of the Hungarian prime minister has so far brought him no luck: He has been unsuccessful in almost all the proceedings brought against him.

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[1] Url: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/08/25/foreign-companies-in-hungary-complain-of-growing-pressure-from-the-authorities_6721385_4.html

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