Cseh Valentin szerk.: „70 éve alakult a MAORT” – tanulmányok egy bányavállalat történetéből (2009)

Tamás Magyarics: The United States and the Issue of MAORT's Nationalisation

TheUnited Slates and/be Issue of MAORT's Nationalist/lion October 1972, an agreement was struck between the United States and Hungary. Pursuant to it, Budapest was to pay USD 18.9 million over 20 years. The official treaty was signed bv Deputy Prime Minister Péter Vályi and State Secretary William P. Rogers, on March 6, 1973. The MAORT case was one of the cornerstone issues in the decade long ownership talks. Since this was the company of the highest value, it was in the elementary interest of Hungarian negotiators to discredit American demands to the greatest degree they could as far as this was possible. For the communist leadership, the expedient method to do this was maintaining the fiction whereby the steps taken against MAORT were legidmate at their time; that is to say production truly was sabotaged at the company after 1945. What is more, the situation was made all the more complex by virtue of MAORT's predecessor, EUROGASCO having received the exploration and production concession for forty years in 1933, so the subject of the debates also extended to the level of profit that US shareholders would have realised over the course of the remaining 25 years from the recoverable reserves of the company that the Hungarian state - for all intents and purposes - grabbed in 1948. By the time, however, all the i-s were officially dotted at the end of the ownership rights negotiations in 1973, the original concession period had also expired, and Washington did not stress this issue any further either. Literature used BORHI László: Magyarország a hidegháborúban. A Szovjetunió és az Egyesült Allamok között, 1945-1956. Budapest, Corvina,2005. BORI II László: Megalkuvás és erőszak. Az Egyesült Államok és a szovjet térhódítás Magvarországon, 1944-1949. Debrecen, Kossuth Egyetemi Kiadó és MTA TTI, 1997. MAGYARICS Tamás: 'Az Egyesült Államok és Magyarország, 1957-1967'. Századok, 130. (1996) 3. 571-612. PAPP Simon: Eletem. Zalaegerszeg, Magyar Olajipari Múzeum, 2000. SRÁGLI, Lajos: 'American Capital and the Hungarian Oil Industry'. The Hungarian Quarterly, Vol. XI. 11, No. 162. Summer 2001. (downloaded: 26/02/2009) SR AG 1.1 Lajos: A politika csapdáin át. A MAORT története 1938-1949. Zalaegerszeg, Magyar Olajipari Múzeum, 2008.