The White House to Telex: report which mentions Hungarian corruption written by economists, no mention of Pressman

“We have nothing to add to the administration’s compilation of tariff and non-tariff barriers, which was produced by our country’s top economic minds to ensure our trade policy puts America First,” White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly wrote in response to Telex's inquiry.

We wanted to know how the White House would comment on the claim of Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó, that the portion about Hungary in the US report listing the barriers to US foreign trade published shortly before the introduction of tariffs – which identified corruption in Hungary as one of the reasons for the tariffs imposed on the EU – was in fact dictated by former US Ambassador to Budapest, David Pressman.

As we reported based on an article in Válasz Online, the US government published a 397-page report at the end of March that detailed the economic practices which restrict commerce with certain countries. According to the Válasz Online article, the content of the report in question can be linked to the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump just a few days later, as it reveals that the EU is expected to relax trade and investment regulations, while in the case of China and South-East Asia, the objective is to cut imports.

The level of corruption in Hungary being identified as one of the reasons for the US tariffs is also interesting because the Biden administration put Antal Rogán, the head of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's Cabinet Office on the list of sanctioned individuals in January, citing corruption. Reacting to the news at the time, the Hungarian government said the decision was "the last, petty revenge of the outgoing, failed US ambassador". We have previously explored in detail how this sanctioning could have come about, analysing the political context of the case and how long it could take before Rogán is removed from the list – provided that there is political will to do so in the US. At the government briefing on 23 January, Minister of the Prime Minister's Office Gergely Gulyás said that he believed Rogán could be removed from the list "within the foreseeable future, sometime this year".

US companies have had problems with corruption in Hungary before. One need only think of the case of Microsoft, where the company's Hungarian subsidiary gave a substantial discount of between 20 and 32 percent to its retailers without them passing it on to the state-owned companies that were the final buyers.

The so-called "banning scandal" also falls into this category: for years, Bunge, the American company manufacturing and distributing the cooking oils Floriol and Venus, had lobbied with the Hungarian government to lower the VAT on cooking oil, which is the highest in Europe, and to do something about the large-scale VAT evasion practices of Bunge's competitors. It was then that an entrepreneur called Viktor Tábor appeared on the scene, claiming that he could sort it out with a HUF 2 billion bribe. Immediately after the attempted bribery, Bunge went to the US embassy, which ended up banning six people linked to the case from entering the US, including Ildikó Vida, who was head of the National Tax and Customs Authority at the time.