Economy 11 April 2023, 1:00pm

Hungary MoFA talks serious issues on Moscow visit

Portfolio

"There are serious issues on the agenda today with [Russian] Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak," Hungary's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in a Facebook post on Tuesday.

According to the post, the serious issues include "the physical and technical security of the Turkish Stream pipeline, which supplies our country with natural gas, the maintenance of transit through the Friendship pipeline, which supplies our oil, and the prevention of sanctions against the nuclear industry".

In a previous morning post Péter Szijjártó said:

"Hungary's energy security requires uninterrupted gas, oil and nuclear fuel supplies. The fulfilment of these three conditions requires uninterrupted Hungarian-Russian energy cooperation. This is not a matter of political taste, but of physics. Today in Moscow, we will discuss the most important issues of cooperation for the security of Hungarian energy supply, first with Alexander Novak, Deputy Prime Minister for Energy, and then with Alexey Likhachev, CEO of Rosatom."

Szijjártó and Lickhachev will certainly discuss the Paks II project, which is also confirmed by the fact that Gergely Jákli, the CEO of Paks II Zrt., is seen next to Szijjártó in one of the uploaded photos.

He has given an interview to the company's in-house magazine just the other day, and we wrote in an article over the weekend that the status of Russia's Rosatom as a prime contractor could change.

Based on our sources and on the text of the interview, it is conceivable that Paks II Zrt. could be the main contractor, but this would still mean that Rosatom would continue to supply one of the most important parts of the plant, the turbine island, and the role of the French Framatome would really only increase in the control technology (due to the German government's blocking of Siemens Energy's export licence).

Rosatom is currently demanding that Finland's Fennovoima repay early the loan granted to it for the construction of the Hanhikivi nuclear power plant, which will never be built. Rosatom is seeking EUR 3 billion in damages from the consortium for pulling the plug on the project in May last year.

The plant, dubbed the little brother of the Paks II nuclear power plant, will not be built because of the Russian-Ukrainian war, but the project has suffered similar problems to the expansion of the Paks NPP.