Imre Boros clarified: We are not allies of Russia, but of the United States

On Wednesday 12 April, Imre Boros, an economist, minister in the first Orbán government and currently a member of the board of directors of the International Investment Bank gave an interview to HírTV. The interview opened with the US sanctions imposed on the bank that day, and in this part Boros also talked about who he believes Hungary's allies are.

We reported on the interview, highlighting this sentence: "If they want to hit at Russia, they will hit one of its allies, Hungary." Based on this, we published an article under the title: "Hungary is currently an ally of Russia-Hungarian board member of Russian spy bank".

After the interview, we tried to contact both the International Investment Bank and Imre Boros, but the bank did not respond and Boros could only now be reached.

It turns out that we misunderstood his words, for which we apologise to him and to our readers.

Three days after the interview and the publication of our article, news started to spread on the internet that this was not what Boros had actually said. We then checked once again to see exactly what he said, which was as follows:

Hír Tv: How did you react to the US announcement of the sanctions against the International Investment Bank?

Imre Boros: "I think they are one step behind. Because if they want to hit at Russia, then they are actually hitting at one of their allies, Hungary, because we have been the number one shareholder of this bank for quite some time."

In the second sentence of the quote, it is not entirely clear whether "their allies" refers to an ally of Russia or an ally of the United States, although from the grammatical structure, the United States does seem more likely. (For the sake of accuracy, it is worth noting that Boros pronounces the word their ally as "ü-t é", which makes it quite easy to understand it as "szövetségesét" – which would in this case, be a reference to Russia). For those that understand Hungarian, the above-mentioned part may be seen in the video here:

The former minister has now confirmed to Telex that we had misinterpreted his sentence, and that he actually spoke of Hungary as an ally of the United States.

He later added that he meant the NATO alliance, because he believes that with the sanctions, the US is not only punishing Hungary, but also Romania and Bulgaria, which are also members of the alliance.

After clarifying the misunderstanding, we apologized to Imre Boros, which he accepted.

Our original article on the interview has been amended and can be found here, and our detailed article on the International Investment Bank can be found here.