Steven N.The government was willing to agree to the first five rounds of EU sanctions against Russia, but the idea of an oil embargo is a red line for them, Viktor Orbán told Kossuth Rádió on Friday morning.
“There are several problems with the proposal for a Russian oil embargo,” said the Prime Minister, claiming that it ignores the fact that EU Member Countries have different capabilities.
Hungary, for example, can only get a large quantity of its oil through pipelines, and so “the European Commission’s proposal amounts to an economic atomic bomb,” he said.
As it would cost several billion forints and take 4-5 years for Hungary to convert its facilities to a new oil supplier, the Prime Minister questioned whether it would be worth it.
However, oil and gas company MOL had previously given lower estimates than this, stating that it would take an investment of several hundreds of millions of dollars and only 2-4 years to convert its Hungarian and Slovakian refineries to a different type of oil.
MOL recently announced a pre-tax profit of $833 million for just the first quarter of 2022, so it has abundant resources to carry out such a conversion. [444]
Several hundred *thousand* dollars, not ‘several hundred dollars’ perhaps?
Actually it’s “an investment of several hundreds of millions of dollars”(!) (original: “sok száz millió dolláros” befektetéssel)
Thanks for being my copy editor! I should really pay you for this 🙂