10 news you missed because of the refugee crisis

Although the refugee influx never seen in Hungary quite rightly engages the attention of the media and the readers, the fact remains that life goes on in the economy and things happen you should know about. That is why index.hu collected 10 economic news from last week which you probably did not notice.

1. Can we say goodbye to Tesco?

“Tesco value” can disappear from the Hungarian slang, because it goes hard with the British retail chains not only in Hungary, but virtually everywhere, so it plans retreating in many places. Moreover, according to Slovak press reports, it can call for international tenders within one month, through which it would sell its Czech, Slovak, Polish and Hungarian stores. Of course, the company has not confirmed the news, but it is not impossible that instead of Tesco, you can buy in the American Walmart, the French Groupe Casino or the Japanese Aeon soon. Read more HERE.

2. Hungarian Post gets competitor

City Mail company got permission to carry out postal services, which can compete with the Hungarian Post in the delivery of the letters not more than 50 grams. The Dubai-based company’s Hungarian subsidiary has been registered in 2011, but it could not enter the market so far because it did not received permission from the National Media and Communications Authority. The 2013 post law liberalized the market, so in theory private companies can also deliver letters in addition to the public post. Now they can really deliver.

3. Rogan’s neighbor and Szijjarto’s buddy can communicate from HUF 25 billion public money

According to index.hu, you could already read about it, but has also been published in the Public Procurement Bulletin which companies won the HUF 25 billion tender of the National Communications Office. Among the winners are:

HG 360 Advertising Agency, the company of Csaba Csetenyi, who is the neighbor of Antal Rogan and won 9 tobacco shop concessions and HUF 1.5 billion public procurement, and most recently he received HUF 300 million to distribute the anti-immigrant posters (since then, the 5^th district municipality wrote index.hu that they had no relation with HG 360).

The Trinity International Communications Kft. owned by Tibor Kuna, who is the buddy of Peter Szijjarto and won so many public procurements with his company called Young and Partners that he chose to apply with Trinity.

The Mindshare Media Agency signed a contract worth  HUF 244 million with BKK last year, but it has already received a plenty of state orders even under the left-wing governments.

4. There is something in which not the whole EU, but Uganda and Malawi are also better than us. What is that?

The extent of how transparent and understandable that on what the government spends the taxpayers’ money. The international organization called Budget Partnership examined the budget transparency in 102 countries and Hungary could finish 45^th in 2014 which is not so honoring. This means that the whole EU is ahead of us, 5 African countries and half-dictatorships like Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Colombia and Papua New Guinea. What is the problem? Among other things:

it is not clear how much spends the budget and on what kind of functions (eg. education, healthcare),
most of the explanations just tells us that how many percent some spending increases, but it does not say why
the government does anything it wants with the reserves, residual funds and transferred money: it impairs the budgetary powers of the parliament.

Of course, the Ministry of National Economy immediately protested against the survey and they think it assessed very subjective points of view.

5. Maternity leave is for two years