The Hungarian government wants to sue Spar for defamation. “A case will be opened against Spar in court, probably for defamation,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyás, said on Thursday. The reason is a complaint in Brussels.
The Austrian government and Spar wrote letters to the European Commission in March explaining that a special tax introduced in 2020 discriminated against foreign retailers in Hungary.
The special tax is therefore contrary to EU law. The Salzburg-based trade group declined to comment on the threat of legal action from the Hungarian government. “We do not comment on this,” the APA said in response to a request.
Complaint is being investigated
The European Commission announced in April that it was investigating the complaints. The supermarket chain, owned by the founding family Reisch, Drexel and Poppmeier, is one of the largest Austrian trading companies. In addition to the home market, the company is active in Hungary, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia.
Since the government announced the measure, taxes for retailers in Hungary have risen to 4.5 percent of turnover, Spar Austria director Hans Reisch said in the letter to the European Commission. Foreign retailers, including Spar Hungary, “face the highest tax bracket of the special tax,” Reisch wrote in March.
Competitors benefit
He added that Hungarian competitors operating in franchise chains consistently benefit from a lower tax rate of up to one percent. The tax forces foreign retailers to operate at a loss because retail profit margins would be less than 4.5 percent, Reisch explained.
Source: Krone
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