Budapest  - Hungary's socialist government presented a new tax package to parliament on Monday which it hopes will make the country one of the most competitive in the region.

Corporate tax will be raised from 16 to 19 per cent, but because a "solidarity" tax on company profit will be scrapped, the de facto rate will fall from 20 to 9 per cent.

Budapest - A prime suspect in the murder of Romanian handball international Marian Cozma outside a Hungarian nightclub turned himself in towards midnight on Thursday, police reported on Friday morning.

Ivan Sztojka, 27, was interviewed for five hours. He admitted being at the club, but denied having killed or injured anybody and said he had not seen who did commit the crimes.

Lawyer Ivor Drescher told the newspaper Nepszabadsag that he had known his client's family for years and was convinced that Sztojka is not a member of a mafia-like gang, as was widely reported in Hungary.

Budapest - The Hungarian Financial Supervisory Authority (HSFA) has fined the London-based bank HSBC for violating local laws in a bond trading deal last October.

The regulatory body announced on its website that it had imposed a fine of 80 million forints (350,000 dollars) on the bank for breaking local laws on manipulating the market.

The financial watchdog found that HSBC had offered for sale a large volume of Hungarian government bonds on October 10 last year, a move which led to rise in the yield of the bonds.

Budapest  - Hungary's construction industry is to be given an 8-billion-dollar shot in the arm over the next year and a half in a bid to protect jobs and boost the country's flagging economy, the government announced on Wednesday.

Minister for National Development and Economy Gordon Bajnai told reporters that the money, over 1.8 trillion Hungarian forints, would be used to support 636 major projects over the next 18 months.

Budapest  - A passenger was killed when a helicopter plunged i

Budapest  - Austrian police arrested one of two men suspected of killing Romanian handball international Marian Cozma, Hungarian officials said Sunday night.

Hungarian police spokeswoman Piroska Varadi said international arrest warrants had been issued for two suspects, Sandor Raffael and Ivan Sztojka, but did not confirm which of the two had been caught at the Austrian border.

Cozma was killed and two of his teammates injured in a knife attack outside a Hungarian nightclub early Sunday.