Sziget Troubled By Rent Rumours

Sziget Festival organisers want a meeting with Budapest Mayor Istvan Tarlos, following reports he wants to hike the rent the Hungarian event is charged for using the 108-hectare island site on the River Danube.

Reports on Hungary’s Café Radio said Tarlos, a conservative and former mayor of the Óbuda district where Sziget takes place, wants to raise the fee to euro 9 million ($11.9 million) – more than 90 percent of the festival’s annual budget.

Some subsequent radio reports suggest the figure the mayor wants is closer to euro 4 million ($5.3 million).

In 2008 festival managing director Gábor Takács and business partner Karoly Gerendai sold Sziget to Hungarian media giant Econet in a deal reported to be worth nearly US$30 million.

Takács is confident the event will happen in 2011, and Sziget has released a statement saying “the organisers presume that this unrealistic figure must be the result of a miscalculation.”

Takács told Pollstar he doesn’t want to make further comment on the situation until after meeting with Mayor Tarlos.

The statement also says the organisers are confident that, as in of “each and every one” of the numerous disagreements with the mayor’s office in the past, they can once again come to an agreement with the mayor.

Sziget has historically had battles with various mayors serving the Hungarian capital.

In 2002 Dr. Tamas Derce, the mayor of Újpest, lost a legal action he brought against the event because he claimed it made too much noise.

In 2008 he tried again and asked the court to force the organisers to shut down the music at 6 p.m. The court was happy to accept the event’s assurance that the main stage would shut at 11 p.m.

In 2001, early in his 10-year stay as mayor of the Óbuda district, Tarlos said he was not prepared to grant Sziget a license on the grounds that it openly encouraged homosexual practices.

He said he particularly objected to the Magic Mirror disco tent, which he believed to be a “hotbed of homosexuals.”

In order to make sure the festival took place at all, the organisers had to sign an undertaking that the event would not give official encouragement to homosexuality.