The government will propose new anti-graft measures within the first half of the year, Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai told reporters at a joint news conference with Chair of Transparency International (TI), Huguette Labelle in Budapest on Tuesday.

Under the measures, a bill will be submitted to parliament on a scheme of public interest protection reporting before the end of June, said Bajnai. The structural framework is planned so that it allows enough independence from government without increasing the cost of state administration, he said.

The measures will also include resubmitting a bill on party financing reform, Bajnai said. He noted that a bill to reform the insufficient and untenable structure of party financing had been drafted a year and a half ago but failed to pass for lack of a two-thirds support in parliament.

Bajnai acknowledged that in Transparency International corruption reports Hungary "has not done very well" over the past years and even slipped further in 2008. Therefore, he said, the government must even in the midst of the economic crisis tackle and clamp down on corruption.

Huguette Labelle said she and the PM had reviewed prospective steps that the Hungarian government should take to fight corruption. She proposed steps on party financing, regulating public procurement in large-scale infrastructure investments and working out a scheme of legal protection for those reporting corruption.

She noted that in TI's surveys on corruption, Hungarians mentioned political parties in the first place, followed by businesses.

Labelle also met President Laszlo Solyom, later in the day, to outline TI's work and discuss with him corruption in Hungary, the president's office told MTI. She commended the president's initiative on a panel of experts, which had been set up and entrusted with putting forward proposals on fighting corruption.