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The Regions This Week
May 10, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 7
Central Europe
European Council President Donald Tusk waded into Polish politics ahead of the May European Parliament election. Tusk told the government
in his home country Poland to respect the constitution and not to add fuel to the fire of “political civil war” in a speech in Warsaw.
Danish prosecutors charged 10 former Danske Bank managers in connection to a massive money laundering scandal centring on the bank’s Estonian branch, newspaper Berlingske reported.
Ladislav Kamenicky from the ruling Smer-SD party became Slovakia’s new finance minister. He replaced resigned Peter Kazimir who will assume the Slovakia´s central bank governor post on June 1.
The Latvian economy is expected to grow
the fastest in the Baltics in 2019 and 2020, according to the latest forecast from the European Commission. The Latvian economy will expand 3.1% in 2019 and 2.8% in 2020. Lithuania and Estonia are expected to grow slightly slower.
PPF Group, the holding company of Czechia’s richest man Petr Kellner, sold a 10% share of Skoda Group Transportation engineering company to the company owned by Michal Korecky, a member of Skoda Transportation’s supervisory board. Skoda Transportation is Central Europe’s biggest manufacturer of
rail vehicles and employs 5,300, mostly in Plzen and Sumperk.
An Albanian soldier was killed and two others were injured in an explosion during a Nato training mission in Latvia. Female junior
officer Zarife Hasanaj was killed neutralising WW1 explosives in the Nato base of Camp Adazi.
Estonia's consumer price index (CPI) growth came in at 3.2% y/y in April, data from Statistics Estonia showed. CPI expansion was driven by
fast-growing prices in the food and non-alcoholic beverages segment.
The Czech National Bank (CNB) increased the two-week repo rate by 25 base points to 2% from 1.75%, the highest level since February 2009. The Lombard rate amounted to 3% and the discount rate to 1%, according to the CNB. The central bank´s decision to hike its rates is based on its new macroeconomic forecast.
Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis will resign if he doesn’t make it to the top two in Lithuania’s May 12 presidential election, he told Reuters. Former finance minister and former central bank deputy governor Ingrida Simonyte and ex-banker Gitanas Nauseda are leading the polls.
The Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Hungary-based Central European University (CEU) signed an agreement on cooperation.
The agreement would allow CEU to continue granting US academic degrees in Budapest if legal guarantees are provided by the government, which has been very hostile towards the university and its founder, George Soros.
Hungary’s industrial output growth accelerated from 5.9% in February to 8% in March, according to preliminary figures from the local statistics office KSH. The pace of growth accelerated in vehicle manufacturing, but slightly slowed in
the computer, electronics, and optical products segment in March, the KSH said.
Latvia's calendar adjusted industrial production expanded 1.5% y/y in March, the Central Statistical Bureau (CSB) reported. The reading marks the first expansion in industrial production after contractions in the two preceding months and also in four out of the previous six months.