Steps Towards a Reformed Financial Criminal Law in Hungary
With Hungary’s accession to the European Union, the national and European budgets got into considerably closer contact with each other. On the other hand, we should also see and note that after the accession, the practice of budget fraud related to acquisitions within the EU has evolved. These crimes included various VAT-related frauds such as accepting pro forma invoices related to domestic sales activities and other economic activities related to acquisitions and sales within the Community. In the second part of our series on budget fraud in Hungary, we focus on the effective Hungarian regulation. Read more... (Petra Ágnes Kanyuk)
The protection of the European Union’s financial interests holds a prominent place within the EU’s institutional framework, as is historically evident from the inclusion in EU primary law of the requirement that Member States ensure their effective protection, equivalent to that reserved for their national counterparts. As regards the Hungarian regulation, on the road leading to the establishment of the legal definition of budget fraud currently in force in the new Criminal Code, the effective protection of the budget of the EU or EC as a need was the most pronounced among the factors which brought about the formulation. In the following, we aim to summarise the outline of the development of budget fraud in Hungary in two parts. 
In January 2022, the new Guidelines on state aid for climate, environmental protection and energy 2022 (’CEEAG’) will replace the Guidelines on State aid regarding environmental protection and energy 2014-2020 (’EEAG’). The Commission intends to align the new guidelines with the EU's objectives and targets set out in the European Green Agreement and with regulatory reforms in the fields of energy and the environmental protection, while extending the scope of soft law to climate protection. 
The Advocate General, in his Opinion delivered on 16 December 2021, proposes that the Court allow the appeal brought by Ireland and annul the Commission’s decision declaring aid which Luxembourg granted to Fiat as being incompatible with the internal market. 
The exponential growth in the importance of the digital economy and the debates surrounding it fill a large part of today's legal discourse. Demonstrating the unheard-of advance of this new economic segment, a 2018 Commission report found that the largest digital companies had an average annual growth rate of around 14% in the seven years preceding the report, compared to 0.2% for 'traditional' transnational companies, and five of the six largest companies in the world were digital companies. 
In the latest episode of the intra-EU investment arbitration saga, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on 26 October 2021 in Poland v. PL Holdings (Case C-109/20) that EU Member States are precluded from concluding with investors from another EU Member State an ad hoc arbitration agreement identical to an arbitration clause of an international treaty deemed invalid under the CJEU’s Achmea case law (Case C-284/16).