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Slovenia’s biggest infrastructure investment will be the development of the Divaca-Koper railway line once they reach at least one hoe. The Hungarian government would enter construction starting in 2018, but one government has already entered the deal. Now Janez Jansa and Viktor Orbán are strong allies, so the participation in Budapest is back on the agenda. Lőrinc Mészáros’ partner company has become very active in Slovenia and there are many signs that it will not be left out of the billion dollar deal. Detailed description of the political and commercial background of the project.
Slovenia’s most important and most expensive planned infrastructure development in the country’s history, the multi-track railway line between Divaca and Koper, appears to have been cursed – plans have been in place since 2015 to further increase Adriatic port traffic, but they have never been achieved. The next time it seemed to start construction was in early 2018, as then Hungary, whose main commercial maritime connection is the Koper terminal, indicated that it was willing to participate in the financing of the investment in exchange for a concession right to create your own business area.
At that time, the centrist but rather leftist Miro Cerar was the Prime Minister of Slovenia, so the negotiations with the government of Viktor Orbán were more difficult, but in the end the agreements were made. However, the local leadership did not know what to do with the environmentalists who attack the investment, initiating a referendum on development. The referendum was also held in September 2017, where construction could not be avoided in the end, but the government finally resigned on March 15, 2018 because the local supreme court found it irregular that the Ljubljana government was campaigning for public funds for the project. For this reason, a new referendum was called for May, in which, although the construction was rejected, very few took part in the decision that the government would have cut the construction. Then the Hungarians abandoned the 1 billion euro development there (the Hungarian share, including the concession fee, would have been 200 million euro, calculated at the then exchange rate of around 60 billion HUF, the EU could enter the program with up to 500 million euros).
Governments fell one by one
Then an uncertain period began in Slovenia, after the resignation of the government, a multi-party coalition was formed, which was essentially indecisive because the parties could not agree on almost anything, such as the railway project. Thus, after another government crisis, other early elections arrived, then a new government was formed, and finally failed, but this year the right-wing opposition and the centrists managed to form a new coalition without elections, so Viktor’s ally Orbán, Janez Jansa, became prime minister.
It was a great political resurrection: from 2004 to 2008 and from 2012 to 2013, he already led the Ljubljana government, but in April 2014 he was sentenced to prison for a crime of corruption. The court found it proven that in 2006 he accepted bribes from the Finnish arms manufacturer Patria. He was convicted in the first instance in June 2013, but the politician appealed. Two other defendants, businessman Ivan Crnkovic and Tone Krkovic, general of the Slovenian army, were sentenced to 22 months in prison and fined 37,000 euros (11 million florins) per person, a sum that Jansa had to pay. The politician had waited until the last minute for the Supreme Court or the Constitutional Court to suspend his sentence, but in 2014 he had to go to jail. It is particularly brilliant in light of this that he was able to return to the 2019 elections without his party having a parliamentary majority, but at least won the most votes.
Amid the coronavirus epidemic, Janez Jansa was able to take his place in March, ushering in a new era in relations between Hungary and Slovenia, but also a period of scandals in Ljubljana. The new coalition was in power just a few weeks ago when it came to light about the purchase of ventilators: Epidemiological agencies were pressured to buy machines that were inadequate for treating COVID patients, overvalued by experts, from a company. Finally, Geneplanet doo. he himself retired from state business, but had by then resigned as interior minister and chief of police, with the head of the Ministry of Economy conducting a home search. A few days after the deal that fell into the hole, the advanced company signed the contract that Hungary would buy the equipment for twice the Slovenian price. Since then, the case has been investigated by the local special prosecutor’s office.
Jansa also joined the Hungarian and Polish governments on Wednesday on the EU recovery fund and seven-year budget, assuring the two countries of their support for his veto on the rule of law mechanism. Because of this, his coalition partners were isolated from the prime minister (Jansa’s party alone does not have a majority), and the opposition immediately began to attack the politician, who has now plunged again into a government crisis that had to explain your Hungarian alliance on Thursday night.
This was not the only Hungarian thread
While local and Hungarian public opinion pointed out that the Slovenian prime minister supported the Hungarian-Polish veto of the coast (presumably he would vote for the rule of law mechanism, he only defends in principle the two renowned member states), there was another issue of interest to Budapest. In Slovenia: After two years of parking, the Hungarian government reappeared in the development of the Divaca-Koper railway line.
Local portal 24ur.com now writes that the Jansa government has asked the parliamentary foreign affairs committee to consider a draft agreement on Hungary’s participation in infrastructure development. The details of the deal are not yet known (the exact parameters of the deal, which almost came to fruition in 2018, were later encrypted by a separate law) but it is clear that the Orbán government did not dismiss Koper. Not only about the railway line, which is part of China’s One Zone, One Road project, but also about the presence of the port.
There have been hints of this before: When asked by Napi.hu regarding Hungarian port projects in June, the Foreign Ministry confirmed that development was not off the agenda.
During the negotiations between Hungary and Slovenia, the development of transport relations is always a priority issue. It is in the interest of both countries to ensure the predictability and speed of transport routes between the two countries, through the development of road links and the modernization of rail links. To this end, we are opening new road crossings, working with Slovenia in the preparation of the Zalaegerszeg-Rédics-Lendava-Beltinci railway line, and we also aim to provide the necessary conditions for effective cooperation between Hungarian and Slovenian actors involved in logistics. and freight transport (such as the port of Koper).
– The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade then told our newspaper without going into details.
A Hungarian company has already arrived there once.
There is logic in the Hungarian interest, because in Koper 55% of the Hungarian maritime cargo turnover is handled, in 2019 alone we launched 160 thousand containers with 2 million tons of cargo. Although this is barely a tenth of the traffic in the Slovenian port, trade in Hungary is still the second largest at the terminal.
And Viktor Orbán’s government takes the ports that transport Chinese goods seriously: in Trieste, the Hungarian state has already acquired the concession rights to take over the management of the terminal.
According to the original plans, several Hungarian companies were reportedly involved in the development of the Koper railway line: the Slovenian press most frequently mentioned the Belfry group, which has its own division in the country and has quickly become a star in recruitment public in recent years. : As partners of Lőrinc Mészáros, they won the tenders in a row, thanks to which the turnover of the road and railway constructor Belfry PE Kft. Jumped to 14.46 billion in 2019, and its profit after tax exceeds 1.5 thousand million (according to Opten data). The uphill entrepreneur billionaire is also a sponsor of the Osijek soccer team and has an interest (Osijek Asfalt doo) in the Croatian city.
In Slovenia, it has been more noticed that Nova24, the media center of the largest ruling party, is one of the largest television advertisers, according to an article in Necenzurirano.si earlier this year. The revival of advertising activity may indicate that they are making a new bid to participate in the project, which they have the opportunity to do because the general contractor has not yet been selected and is not expected to decide until next May. As Primorske Novine points out, among the contractors who continued to compete in the second round, Hungarian interests must also be taken into account in the selection. Strabag’s permanent partner is also said to be Belfry, and the former company is already one of the most likely players in the construction industry.
Regarding the Divaca-Koper investment, we contacted the Ministry of the Environment with our questions, but they did not respond until the article was published.
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