Economy of Hungary

Ljubljana – Owners of motor vehicles are heading for Slovenian service stations en masse on Sunday as regular petrol and diesel prices are expected to rise considerably when a new pricing model kicks in on Tuesday. All three major fuels providers, Petrol, OMV and MOL, have experienced occasional shortages today.

Ljubljana – Hungarian energy group MOL has acquired a network of 120 service stations operated by Austrian energy group OMV in Slovenia, subject to regulatory approval. The purchase consideration for the outright stake in the company OMV Slovenija is EUR 301 million, MOL announced on Tuesday.

Ero believes the ruling Fidesz party has been the driving force behind this vainglorious project on the grounds that Prime Minister Viktor Orban needs an iconic building to symbolise Hungary's position as a regional power.

Fitch Ratings has affirmed Romania's Long-Term Foreign and Local Currency Issuer Default Rating (IDR) at 'BBB-' with a Stable Outlook, but warned that the budget deficit might widen to 3.4 percent of the GDP in 2019, a release of the agency informed.

With war still ongoing in Syria, plans for Croatian energy company INA to regain control over the gas and oil fields it partly owns in the country are viewed with some doubt by a leading expert.

Former general director of INA Davor Stern told BIRN that it is hard to say if regaining control over the fields is physically possible.

Croatia's planned purchase of the shares of the national energy company INA from the Hungarian energy company MOL is bound to increase Croatia's public debt, an economic analyst told BIRN.

Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said on Christmas Eve that purchasing MOL's share of INA - 49.1 per cent of the shares - can be done without enlarging the public debt.

Hungary's government is on its way to cut the corporate tax to the lowest level in the EU in a sign of increasingly competitive tax practices among countries seeking to lure foreign direct investment, according to the Financial Times.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said a new 9% corporate tax rate would be introduced in 2017, significantly lower than Ireland's 12,5% and Bulgaria's 10%.

After Bulgaria's leading blue-chip index SOFIX returned to a growth path in March, it has been moving up in the rankings of Central and Eastern Europe.

According to calculations of Bulgarian business news portal investor.bg, based on Bloomberg data, SOFIX moved to second place among the top-performing indices in the region in March.