Hungary will do its utmost to ensure that the Croats do not abuse their monopoly position and drastically increase the transit fees for the Adriatic oil pipeline, said Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó to radio station Spirit FM on Thursday.
“Croatia is planning to increase the transit fee for the Adriatic oil pipeline by two and a half times from 2023, which the Hungarian government considers an abuse of its monopoly position,” Szijjártó told the radio station’s Fight Club program. The Hungarian foreign minister said that the Hungarian government is urging the European Commission to intervene.
According to Szijjártó, this is a European problem, which he will raise in the appropriate EU forums, for example on Monday, when the ministers responsible for energy issues will meet again in Brussels to discuss the details of the introduction of the gas cap.
“The European Commission must press the Croats to expand capacity and at the European level, in such a situation, to reject the idea of a significant increase in transit tariffs, abusing the situation of war,” he added.
Speaking about the war in Ukraine, Szijjártó said that when the conflict broke out, the European Commission immediately introduced sanctions against Russia, but this did not stop Moscow, and instead significantly harmed the EU economy. One of the problems is that there is no European leader of the caliber of Angela Merkel, who after the Crimea crisis was able to bring the parties to the negotiating table and avoided war.
On Hungarian-Russian relations, he stressed that cooperation between Moscow and Budapest is limited to a few technical issues.
