Borvendég Zsuzsanna: Fabulous Spy Games. How international trade networks with the West developed after 1945 - A Magyarságkutató Intézet Kiadványai 24. (Budapest, 2021)
‘THE HUNGARIAN MAFIA’ - A Cold War Hungaricum
FABULOUS SPY GAMES must have had economic reasons, too. In 1963, for example, a West German company used the Hungarian foreign trade company Monimpex to buy coffee from Kenya.232 Hungary was given discounts by the African country as a new commercial partner of the Kenyan market, and was therefore able to buy the product at reduced rates. The final beneficiary of the transaction was a coffee importing company called Rothfos, owned by the businessman Harald Köln, who moved in Emil Hoffmanns circles. Following the delivery of 9,000 bags of coffee beans, the German partner transferred half of the price difference, 18,000 US dollars, to the Hungarian company. The Hungarian partner took no risks with the transaction as even the shipment was arranged by Harald Köln, so the leaders of Hungarian foreign trade were getting ready to arrange further coffee and cocoa transports, and also engaging other countries.233 The person behind the negotiations was Ferenc Arató, former head of the compensation department of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and deputy general manager of the MKB at the time. Arató was previously known as a real expert in switch transactions,234 and reports by János Nyerges show that he was already involved in foreign trade machinations during his time at the ministry. In early 1956, for example, he attempted to broker a fraudulent deal proposed by a German trader in close cooperation with János Fekete. The German trader wanted to deliver goods to the Brazilian markets by forging documents of origin and transport to present the goods to customs as Hungarian industrial goods, regardless of 232 ÁBTL 3.1.5 O-12344/7-a Report no. 201, 27 April 1963. 233 ÁBTL 3.1.5 O-12344/7-a p. 202 Negotiations report by Monimpex, 30 March 1963 234 Kövér [2001], p. 19 Switch transactions were the other popular form of special transaction associated with foreign trade for socialist Hungary. A switch was based on international state trade agreements in which the volumes of particular goods to be exchanged was determined in advance for one year. The emphasis here is on the word exchange because the transactions took place without actual movements of currency. Instead, goods were paid for with other goods. For these deliveries, the intrinsic value of the products was determined and recorded in a clearing currency; this is not an actual amount of money, it simply records the debts/receivables. The given country obtained access to the currency after the contractual deadline expired, but at a slight loss, because the purchasing value of the clearing currency was always lower than that of the convertible currency, so if the goods obtained during the exchange were sold on the convertible market, the country did gain access to convertible currency, or disposable currency, but this value fell short of the value of the goods delivered based on the clearing settlement. 84
