laid down largely due to the leaking of Montecuccoli's memorandum, while the proposal for constructing four new battleships still remained in the planning stages. Complicating the matter further was the collapse of Sándor Wekerle's government in Budapest, which left the Hungarian Diet without a prime minister for nearly a year. With no government in Budapest to pass a budget, efforts to secure funding and begin construction had stalled. The budget crisis likewise affected industries with close ties to the navy, particularly the Witkowitz Ironworks and the Škoda Works. With nearing completion and the only remaining Austro-Hungarian battleship still under construction in the shipyards of Trieste, the major shipbuilding enterprises in Austria offered to begin construction on three dreadnoughts at their own financial risk, in exchange for promises from the Austro-Hungarian government that the battleships would be purchased as soon as the budget impasse had been resolved. After negotiations involving the ministries of foreign affairs, war and finance, the navy agreed to the offer but lowered the number of dreadnoughts that would be constructed before a budget was passed from three to two. In his memoirs, former Austrian Field Marshal and Chief of the General Staff Conrad von Hötzendorf wrote that due to his belief in a future war with Italy, construction on the battleships should begin as soon as possible. He also worked to secure agreements to sell the dreadnoughts to, in his words, a "reliable ally" (which only Germany could claim to be) should the budget crisis fail to be resolved in short order. Facing potential backlash over constitutional concerns that the construction of the first two battleships committed Austria-Hungary to spend roughly 120 million Kronen without prior approval by either the Austrian Reichsrat or the Diet of Hungary, the deal remained secret. In the event of the agreement being leaked to the press prior to the passage of a new naval budget, Montecuccoli drafted several explanations to justify the battleships' construction and the necessity to keep their existence a secret. These included the navy's urgent need to counter Italy's naval build up and desire to negotiate a lower price with their builders. By the time the agreement was leaked to the public in April 1910 by the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the newspaper of Austria's Social Democratic Party, the plans had already been finalized and construction on the first two battleships, Viribus Unitis and Tegetthoff, was about to begin. Costs The