Budapest Mayor Karácsony: Plans to park municipalities’ savings at State Treasury harms their financial autonomy

A planned decree of the financial ministry that would oblige local authorities to keep their savings at the State Treasury is “once again” in breach of municipalities’ financial autonomy as enshrined in the Fundamental Law and the European Charter of Local Self-Government, Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony said on Tuesday.

Karácsony expresses dislike

“When this government is in trouble … their usual solution is to reach into others’ pockets. They don’t ask themselves whether they should … buy office buildings from the prime minister’s son-in-law for 700 billion forints. They rather reach into the pockets of Hungarian localities,” Karácsony said on Facebook.

Karácsony said the plan was yet another move to “dismantle the autonomy and independence of local authorities” who have been banned from taking out loans and their revenues “syphoned off” through the solidarity contribution. “Now they can’t even handle their remaining monies freely,” he said.

He said municipalities should be allowed to decide for themselves where they want to keep their money. He stressed that he wasn’t calling for the savings to be held at commercial banks but rather for municipalities to decide freely where their savings would be safest, and whether “their money is safe with a state that keeps trying to put its hand on it,” he said.

He called on the government to “start shedding transparency on itself” by accounting for the revenues from the solidarity contribution and “how the money taken from Budapest reached small localities, which are themselves under an increasing burden year by year.” The government should also react to a report by a European Council expert saying that the monies “did not reach small localities but disappeared in the bottomless pocket of the government,” he added.