Hungary’s former debtors are carrying their debts since decades, napi.hu says.

This money, a few billions forint, looks like a small change compared with the domestic budget, which was given in the sign of the socialist help including to Cuba, North Korea and Nicaragua before the regime change. Hungary had claims in a worth of HUF 5 billion last year, this amount decreased only HUF 520 million during a year – these are the latest data from the final accounts of the last year.

According to napi.hu, North Korea, Albania, Cuba , Nicaragua, Nigeria and Sudan are owing to Hungary. The majority of the countries got dollar credit, but two of them – North Korea and Cuba – got transferable ruble. Willingness to pay of the debtors is different: one end of the scale is North Korea, who thinks repayment of the loans is a ’capitalist humbug’. The country asked the Hungarian government to abolish the debt, but none of the governments were willing to do this since the regime change. Legally, the government is not event competent in this topic: the parliament should decide about it for example within the final accounts.

Abolition of the debts is cannot be exptected because it is a matter of principle of the respective government. While North Korea and Cuba are not paying, Albania and Nicaragua are repaying their debts, but the budget had only HUF 349 million revenue from this source, which counts as a penny, but it would be not fair to those states that have opted for repayment, napi.hu says.

The discharge report reveals that Albania finished paying back her debts and Nicaragua is planning to end with her HUF 182 million until 2020. The remaining outstanding amount belongs to the not-paying countries such as Cuba and Sudan.

The fate of this money likely will be the debt cancellation in the context of international actions (EU, OECD, IMF), just as it happened in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Husein. But this programmes will not start until similar political changes happen in the above mentioned countries.

based on the article of napi.hu
translated by Becsi