Heated situation: Hungarian transport minister Lázár sends open threat to Spar

Hungarian transport minister János Lázár sent an open threat to Spar on Thursday. This comes after we reported a few days ago that the CEO of Spar Austria told an Austrian news outlet that Hungarian PM Orbán wanted one of his relatives to invest in the company. Thus, the Spar started taking out capital from the country. Now, Lázár said the government would not tolerate threats from Spar, which sent a message to the government through the “corrupt Austrian press”.

We reported HERE that Spar has modified its operation to protect itself from PM Orbán and his oligarchs. They decided to take some of their capital to Switzerland from Hungary.

Today, János Lázár sent an open “declaration of war” to Spar at the Portfolio.hu construction conference. He said that the government would not tolerate threats from Spar, which he said had sent a message to the government through the “corrupt Austrian press”, mfor.hu reports.

Lázár: “We will stop tolerating lies”

jános lázár spar transport minister — János Lázár sent an open threat to Spar. Source: MTI/Máthé Zoltán

“Now that the Austrian “grocer” Spar has behaved in this way, I have asked the government to stop tolerating lies and unfounded allegations from them and buy them without hesitation,” Lázár said.

The Minister of Construction and Transport, however, correcting himself, made it clear that he did not want to squeeze out the Austrian company and the multinationals in general, of the country. He just wants to force them to “respect the people, the consumers, the government and the country where they make huge extra profits.”

“We can swim against Spar*. The company will pay the price for what it has done in the past few days,” Lázár said in his heated speech. (*In Hungarian, he said “a Sparral szemben”, which is a word play on “az árral szemben”, which means “against the current” – ed.)

Contradictory statements

spar store hungary food — Photo credit: Daily News Hungary

“Our problem is not with capital, but with the multinationals intervening, running the country and making extra profits, which they take away”, he added. In comparison, a few sentences later, he said that there were three major development directions to follow: the car industry, the defence industry and the food industry should be given a big boost.

The contradiction is that he said: “We want the three big German car companies to produce cars that are as expensive as possible and make as much profit as possible.”

Find the background to Lázár’s statement below:

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