Gábor Kovács

Gábor Kovács

Under a non-public government decision, contracts for the August 20, 2020 celebrations will need to be brought forward one year, everything else will remain, at a cost of up to $ 8 billion. So far the savings that Gergely Gulyás mentioned earlier.

The National Office of Communications and the Tourism Marketing Communication Agency have modified their contracts for the Budapest Fireworks series and St. Stephen’s Day on August 20, 2020, according to a notice published in the Public Procurement Notice of the EU and contract amendments uploaded to the public procurement system.

Both contracts were won by state-owned Antenna Hungaria in a restricted procedure for amounts never seen before: fireworks alone amount to HUF 1.3 billion (of which at least HUF 910 million must be spent), the series of events has a budget of HUF 6.6 billion (of which at least HUF 4 billion, 6 billion to be exhausted). These are much larger sums than the state has earmarked for fireworks and events thus far.

The deadlines for the fulfillment of the contracts have been changed to 2021, that is, no new public acquisitions will be announced for the 2021 orders, the tasks will be performed by Antenna Hungaria at the expense of the 2020 order, for at least 5.5 billion, optionally for 8,000 million.

The government did not make a public decision

According to the justification, the contracts concluded with Antenna Hungaria can be modified and it is not necessary to carry out a new public procurement procedure because the public celebrations scheduled for August 20, 2020 at the government meeting of July 15, 2020 – the state ceremony and related events decided to postpone it until August 20, 2021.

On the other hand, the explanatory memorandum also refers to the decision of the Government of 2000 “in which it agreed that the resources of the central budget foreseen for the organization of the Cycle of Events be charged to the fireworks and the Resolution of the Government of 20th of August

the contracts concluded must be extended to organize the Series of Events in 2021,

and instructed the accounting of the execution of the contracts concluded.

The government resolutions of 2000 got their name from the fact that their number begins with 2000, they are not secret in the strict sense (they are 3000), but since 2008 they have not been made public, they have only been given to interested parties. That is to say

the government made an explicit decision in a non-public decision to extend the 2020 contracts through 2021.

The parties agreed that the foregoing exhausts the notion of force majeure and that the postponement of one year of the execution dates does not modify the general nature of the contracts, so there is no obstacle to their modification.

They didn’t say they wouldn’t be left behind, but they were postponed

Gergely Gulyás, the head of the Prime Minister’s Office, announced in Government Information on July 16 that, according to the government’s decision, the fireworks would be “lost.” The minister didn’t talk about not actually being left behind, just putting it off for a year, and he even literally said about the money set aside for fireworks:

We are happy if we can save something.

Technically, of course, he was right, since the money will not have to be paid to Antenna Hungaria in 2020, but only in 2021. In any case, the billions of guilders in public opinion also caused some astonishment, considering the coronavirus epidemic and the resulting economic crisis.

The government’s decision was preceded by serious resistance to the events of August 20. Due to the epidemic, a public petition was also launched against the organization of fireworks, according to polls, the vast majority of people did not support its retention, opposition parties and Mayor Gergely Karácsony protested. Furthermore, even the national chief physician Cecília Müller did not consider it a good idea to keep the fireworks going.



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