While it is widely assumed that the high per-kilometer costs of building a motorway in Hungary is due in part to high-level corruption, a recent exposé (in Hungarian only) by financial portal portfolio.hu shows that petty corruption is playing a big role as well.
According to the eye-popping piece, which focuses on the Szekszárd-Bóly section of the M6 motorway, virtually everything involved in building a road can be illicitly bought at a nice discount in quietly-arranged meetings between buyers and sellers of the pilfered goods.
Among the goodies on offer near Szekszárd is cut-rate concrete, which is available in large quantities for Ft 9,000-10,000 per cubic meter, or less than half of the prevailing cost. One “informant” quoted explained that there is much more “surplus” concrete in Hungary than in Germany, where crews avoid leaving their leftovers sitting in the mixer. As you might expect, the discount on petrol is a more modest 20% off the “suggested retail price.” But concrete and petrol are only two of the most sought-after items; another snitch said that “practically everything which is not covered in concrete” is stolen and then re-sold.
Another person interviewed was surprised that the portal would even bother writing such an article, asking “What is so unusual about this? Do you think there is anyone in this country who doesn’t know about these businesses?”
Despite the blasé reaction of this person, the piece led to an interesting back-and-forth over the question of whether construction companies actually “budget in” the expected costs of such larceny. Reacting to the story, National Infrastructure Development Zrt CEO Kálmán Reményik said the answer is yes, while András Rakita, head engineer of Mecsek Construction Group, the company building the stretch of the M6 in question, told Klubrádió said it wasn’t. But Rakita went on to concede that it is impossible to actually prevent such thefts.
Crashing Down
Meanwhile, Hungarian National Geology Institute Director László Kordos said that a recent collapse of a tunnel currently under construction along the same stretch of the M6 could have been prevented, but the organization had not been consulted before work was started.
In response, both Reményik and Rakita said that the cause of the accident was not that the Institute had not been consulted, and that other experts had been brought in, as is allowed under current regulations.
And investigation is underway to determine the exact causes of the accident, and it has not yet been ruled out that it was do to construction materials that had gone missing.