State Treasury: Budapest municipality owns EUR 377.2m in state bonds

The Budapest municipality owns 135 billion forints (EUR 377.2m) in bonds and more than 27 billion in cash, according to the city council’s balance sheet report submitted on July 20, the Hungarian State Treasury said on Monday.

In an interview to public current affairs channel M1 on Saturday, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán called on the municipality to come to the aid of employees of the hospitality sector, which has been badly hit by the coronavirus epidemic. “It is good news” that the city has some 100 billion forints at its disposal to use as it sees fit, Orbán said.

Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony responded on Facebook on Sunday, saying

the capital did not have money to take over the responsibilities of the central government.

He insisted that the city was “150 billion forints in the red”, and that alongside the contraction caused by the coronavirus epidemic, the government’s austerity measures had eroded the municipality’s resources.

Karácsony called on the government to allocate half of the funding from the European Union’s recovery package to local governments, in proportion to their population.