BUDAPEST, Mar 6 – Hungary says it is expelling seven Ukrainian bank workers arrested on Thursday while transporting $80m (£60m) worth of cash and 9kg of gold in cash-transport vehicles to Ukraine.
After Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha accused Budapest of taking the group hostage and stealing money, Hungary’s tax authority said they had been detained on suspicion of money laundering.
Ukraine’s state savings bank, Oschadbank, said they had been part of a regular transport between Austria and Ukraine and were “unjustifiably detained”.
Hungary’s tax authority said it was conducting criminal proceedings and added that the transport was being overseen by a former general of Ukraine’s intelligence service.
“This year alone, more than $900m, €420m and 146 kg of gold bars were transported through the territory of Hungary to Ukraine,” the national tax and customs administration said in a statement on Friday.
It is not yet clear what has happened to the enormous sums of cash and the gold seized on Thursday, but Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said “they’ve stolen the money”.
Relations between Ukraine and Hungary have deteriorated during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and have descended into a war of words over a halt to Russian oil supplies through the Druzhba pipeline in Ukraine.
The arrest of the bank workers comes deep in Hungary’s election campaign, with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán trailing in opinion polls with little more than a month before the vote.
Hungarian reports described how black-clad officials from Hungary’s TEK counter-terrorism centre raided the Ukrainian-registered vehicles on Thursday and then their convoy headed to Budapest.
Sybiha accused Orbán of dragging Ukraine into its “domestic politics and electoral campaign”, adding that Kyiv would not tolerate “this state banditism”.
His opposite number in Budapest, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó, asked why such enormous sums were being moved in cash: “If this is truly a transaction between banks, why was it not carried out by transfer?”
Orbán made no mention of the seven bank workers in his regular radio appearance on Friday, although he did say “transit shipments” important to Ukraine would be halted until a row over Russian oil supplies was sorted out.
Orbán, seen as Russia’s closest ally in the EU, has accused Ukraine of deliberately halting Russian oil through the pipeline.
Kyiv says the pipeline was damaged in a Russian air strike in January, but Orban says satellite images indicate there is no reason why the pipeline should not be working and has threatened to “force the Ukrainians to restart deliveries”.
