Budapest  - The Japanese carmaker Suzuki is to lay off 1,200 workers, over a fifth of its workforce, at its Hungarian plant starting from December 8, the Hungarian state news agency MTI reported on Friday.

In the face of a drastic fall in orders, Suzuki has downscaled its production this year from a planned 300,000 to 282,000, while next year it plans to produce only 210,000 cars.

As a further blow to the Hungarian labour market, the Hungarian unit of Taiwanese electronics company Foxconn told MTI on the same day that it is to lay off a total of 1,500 workers.

Budapest  - Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom and his Slovakian counterpart Ivan Gasparovic plan to meet on December 6 amidst worsening relations between their countries.

A diplomatic row between Hungary and its neighbour to the north broke out earlier this month after a football match at which the police allegedly used excessive force and deliberately targeted Hungarian supporters.

The meeting to try and defuse the growing tension was announced by the presidents' offices on Tuesday, but by Thursday evening Hungary and Slovakia were still wrangling over where to hold the event.

Budapest- Slovakian Interior Minister Robert Kalinak has denied that police acted unlawfully when dealing with ethnic Hungarian football fans earlier this month.

Hungarian Justice Minister Tibor Draskovics confirmed Wednesday evening that he had received a letter from Kalinak about the matter the previous day.

He added that he had accepted an invitation to meet Kalinak in Bratislava. The two ministers were also due to talk briefly in Brussels in Thursday.

Budapest - The European Commission gave conditional approval Tuesday for a consortium led by Rail Cargo Austria (RCA) to purchase MAV Cargo, the freight wing of the state-owned Hungarian railways.

The deal was a[pproved on condition RCA - a subsidiary of the Austrian state railway company OBB - sever all structural ties and review its contractual links with the only other consortium member, the small Hungarian-Austrian railway company GySEV.

The RCA-GySEV consortium won the tender for the privatisation of MAV Cargo in May last year with a bid of 102.5 billion forints (41 million euros), along with a commitment to invest a further 43.5 billion forints (174 million euros) on infrastructure over five years.

Budapest - The Hungarian parliament voted on Tuesday to accept the government's proposed changes to the 2009 budget bill.

The latest budget proposal includes a cap on year-end bonus pension payments and other measures aimed at getting the shaky Hungarian economy onto a firmer footing.

The latest adjustments to the 2009 budget bill, which is expected to be voted through on December 15 were passed by 211 votes to 169.

As it announced on Monday, the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats supported the minority Hungarian Socialist Party's budget proposals, giving the government the necessary majority.

Budapest  - The Hungarian central bank lowered its base rate from 11.5 per cent to 11 per cent in a surprise move Monday.

The bank also issued its latest quarterly inflation report Monday, which warned that Hungary was set to enter a recession next year.

The Hungarian National Bank (MNB), which had in August predicted a 2.6-per-cent growth in GDP in 2009, said that it now expected the economy to shrink by 1.7 per cent to
2 per cent.

The central bank forecast a relatively brief recession, but warned that recovery would be very slow because of the widening economic crisis in countries that form Hungary's main export markets.