Extraordinary expenses fund’s money spent on other purposes

One of the last year’s scandals was when the Hungarian Festival Balett got 130 million HUF from the Extraordinary Expenses Fund, a government fund which was separated from the budget to cover extraordinary costs such as catastrophes or other unusual cases.  The 100 billion HUF budget of this fund enabled the government to cover its purposes but as the State Audit Office of Hungary claimed last year, a huge part of the expenses can not be traced back since it has no clear and transparent account. We filed a freedom of information request to the Ministry of National Economy to learn about this year’s extraordinary expenses. We found out that the government spent a huge amount of money on usual purposes. The expenses covered the development of parlament.hu, communication costs of Ministry of Public Administration and Justice, the so-called economic consultation campaign, the distribution of the constitution’s copies and for Kossuth and Széchenyi prizes. Hungarian government spent almost 10 billion to settle the debts of the Police, hundreds of millions went to football, Formula-1 and the Budapest Music Centre, the Piarists got 1.2 billion and 2 billion went to rail-workers. The government also spent some smaller sums for the compensation of the bankrupted national airline employees, for the costs of the unexpected resignation of president Pál Schmitt, and the summer drought’s damages.

Full article (HU)