Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyas, said this on Thursday. “Proceedings will be opened once morest Spar in court, probably for defamation,” said the politician. The Austrian government and Spar wrote letters to the EU Commission in March saying that a special tax introduced in 2020 discriminated once morest foreign retailers in Hungary.
The special tax therefore violates EU law. The Salzburg trading group did not want to comment on the Hungarian government’s threat of legal action. “We are not commenting on this,” they said when asked.
EU Commission examines complaints
The EU 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 its home market, the company operates in Hungary, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia.
Since the government announced the measure, taxes for retailers in Hungary have risen to up to 4.5 percent of sales, Spar Austria managing director Hans Reisch said in the letter. “Foreign retailers, including Spar Hungary… face the highest tax bracket of the special tax,” Reisch wrote in March. He added that Hungarian competitors operating in franchise chains consistently benefit from a lower tax rate of up to one percent. The tax would force foreign retailers to operate at a loss because retail profit margins would be less than 4.5 percent, Reisch said.
