"Hungary’s unorthodox economic policy has begun to spread within the European Union. First, France introduced a financial transactions duty twice as high as in Hungary, after which Slovakia imposed a special sectoral levy", said András Giró-Szász on Tuesday morning.

Speaking on TV2's Mokka programme, the spokesman said that other countries had also begun to realise that pre-2008 solutions to crisis management were no longer practicable and new ways needed to be identified.

“It is always interesting when a banker speaks about democracy” – responded András Giró-Szász to ATV when the channel cited a leading economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development saying that unorthodoxy means demolishing democracy.

With regard to the IMF/EU talks, the spokesman said that the IMF intended to reduce the burdens of the bank sector while increasing the burdens imposed on the society. Financial institutions would not provide fewer loans because of the new duty, he added, recalling that banks that generated extra profits in 2008-2009 transferred their gains to their foreign parent banks rather than increasing their lending.

The spokesman also said that if arguments were convincing enough, the taxation of the central bank (MNB) could be modified. He noted, however, that the income this latter could generate would then be missing from the job protection action plan, designed to assist 1.5 million people. “Let’s wait and see whether the transactions tax will generate a loss for the central bank”, the spokesman said.

András Giró-Szász spoke on both programmes about the pension scheme by defending the nationalization of private pension savings. "We cannot talk about private ownership in this case since former fund members were not entitled to dispose of their payments freely. Taking them back was decided by Parliament, as was their privatization in 1997", he said. He stressed that the private pension scheme blew a 400 billion forint hole in the state budget each year. This is why the government has created a sustainable pension scheme in which the allowances of all those entitled to a retirement pension are secure. He also added that the state had taken over "devalued pension elements" from the private pension funds, meaning any loss in value had occurred prior to that.

(MTI)