Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó met with International Investment Bank (IIB) chairman Nikolay Kosov in Budapest on Friday, ahead of a meeting of the lender’s board of governors and representatives of its stakeholder countries, the foreign ministry told MTI.
The ministry noted that five international financial institutions are headquartered in Europe, but just one in Central Europe: IIB.
IIB relocated its headquarters from Moscow to Budapest last summer.
Hungary is the second-biggest shareholder in IBB with a 14.7 percent stake, the ministry said. The majority of the bank’s member countries are NATO members, it added. (The biggest shareholder is Russia with more than 40 percent.)
IIB’s members are Bulgaria, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Mongolia, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Vietnam.
So far, IIB has lent 76 million euros to Hungarian businesses, the ministry said. It has also issued about 50 billion forints (EUR 148.6m) of bonds in Hungary, it added.
Photo by Zsolt Burger/Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade