Croatia not reliable oil-transit country, says minister

Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó has criticised Croatia, saying it was not a reliable oil-transit country.

In a Facebook post on Friday, Szijjártó noted that Hungary and Slovakia turned to the European Commission a week and a half ago over Ukraine’s decision to halt the transit of volumes of crude needed for the security of their oil supply.

“Yesterday, the executive vice-president of the European Commission, Valdis Dombrovskis of Latvia, sent a letter to my Slovak counterpart and me,” Szijjártó said. “In this letter he said Ukraine was not endangering the supplies of either Hungary or Slovakia, and besides, there is another pipeline going through Croatia that we can use,” he said, calling the letter “outrageous”.

Szijjártó said the executive vice-president’s letter “proves once again that the Ukrainians can do whatever they want to EU member states, especially if they are pro-peace and don’t supply weapons”.

Croatia did not carry out the necessary developments

“It’s obviously a coincidence that the Croatian prime minister wrote a letter to the president of the European Commission the day before yesterday in which he advertises the oil pipeline traversing Croatia,” Szijjártó said.

“Besides the two letters confirming that this is a coordinated operation from Brussels, there’s another big problem with the Croatian option,” he said.

“Croatia simply isn’t a reliable transit country,” the minister said. “It’s not reliable because they raised the transit fee of oil to five times the average market fees since the start of the war. It’s not reliable because it has made it impossible for [Hungarian oil and gas company] MOL to contract long-term delivery capacities. It’s not reliable because they haven’t carried out the investments needed for increasing the pipeline’s capacities, and the data they provide on the pipeline’s maximum capacity has never been proven by anyone.”

Szijjártó said this meant that the stoppage of oil deliveries coming from the east would leave Hungary and Slovakia “at the mercy of an unreliable transit country”.

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