Looming broad coalition?
PM Tymoshenko and her government have suffered several set-backs in recent days. The Odessa Portside Plant privatisation sale, so important to Tymoshenko, will not now take place. Inflation is running at over 1.5% per month. BYuT will will not perform as well as hoped in Sunday's Kyiv mayoral and city council elections.
And now there is talk of 'Regiony' conducting talks about formation of a broad [PoR/NUNS] parliamentary coalition.
Here's a bit from a
'4post article':
The process of drawing out the nomination procedure for the PoR candidate for the post of first deputy chairman of the VR may indicate that negotiations on the formation of a broad [PoR/NUNS] coalition are taking place.
According to BYuT VR deputy Volodymyr Filenko, PoR will not make a selection for the post of the first deputy VR chairman, until a broad coalition is formed. The 'nardep' claimed this broad coalition is to be formed after the pre-term mayoral elections in Kyiv have taken place next Sunday.
“The longer the process of nomination for election to the post of vice-speaker is dragged out, the more real this plan becomes,” he said.
Filenko also noted that, according to previous information, after the formation of the broad coalition takes place, a PoR representative will take up the position of VR chairman, and a technical candidate [anyone but Yanukovych?] will become prime minister.
"An oligarchic plot headed by the president is being hatched against his own nation and BYuT," says Filenko.
Bungs in Odessa Portside Plant pipework?
The [
postponed] 'privatization' of the Odessa Portside Plant has been a running major source of conflict between PM Tymoshenko and President Yushchenko. Last Friday the National Security and Defence Council delivered a humiliating blow, forcing Tymoshenko to back down and delay the sale which was planned for today, until further notice.
Mustafa Nayem, in an
excellent article in 'Ukrainska Pravda' provides background to the twists and turns of the entire saga.
Below is just a brief portion:
"Over the four years following the events that took place on the Maidan, both Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko have several times changed their views on the merits of selling off the Odessa Portside [chemical] Plant.
Yushchenko's position has swung according to the firmness of his relations with the government of the day. He has twice expressed his full support for selling the plant: first time in July 2005, before his relations with Tymoshenko drastically deteriorated, and then in January 2006 when his loyal ally Yuriy Yekhanurov was in charge of the government.
But Yushchenko has also categorically rejected the possibility of selling off of the plant, first after sacking Tymoshenko in 2005, then on the eve of the 2007 parliamentary elections, when the Yanukovych administration were trying to sell it off.
'Regionaly', who are now criticising the Tymoshenko government for attempting to replenish state coffers by privatizing the OPP, are in a state of amnesia and reluctant to mention that a year ago it was they that were trying to do the same.
Tymoshenko's path to her current position on the privatization of the OPP is equally tortuous. Having previously initiated submission of the OPP onto the list of objects to be privatized, in 2007 she appealed to Yushchenko in person demanding that he prevent Yanukovych from selling the plant. The leader of BYuT insisted that the plant cannot be split away from the portside trans-shipment facilities [perevalka], even though today her government itself is proposing sale of both the plant and the trans-shipment facilities together."
[Bung - a British slang term, used to refer to a bribe, inducement or incentive in business.]
Itergrum
As I mentioned in my previous blog, the US Vanco Energy Company, with which Yanukovych's government signed an agreement to develop the Kerch section of the Black sea shelf in 2007, has a Ukrainian financial partner - the Donbas fuel and energy company DTEK, controlled to multi-millionaire Rinat Akhmetov. Nothing necessarily wrong with this.
But apart from Akhmetov, Vanco's Black sea project will
be financed also by Shadowlight Investments Ltd owned by Russian businessman Eugene Novitskiy, and a certain Integrum Technologies Ltd. The latter is allegedly a subsidiary of an undisclosed Austrian investment holding. Some allege it could be a cover for 'Gazprom' .
When Minister of the Environment Heorhiy Filipchuk
is asked by 'Dzerkalo Tyzhnya' who is behind Intergrum, and whether it is the president's brother Petro Yushchenko, or the Klyuev brothers [senior Party of Regions figures] who were behind the company, he replies that he had had no official confirmation of this.
Filipchuk's ministry had recently withdrawn Vanco's hydrocarbon exploration and extraction licence. This will, no doubt be challenged or ignored. But shouldn't Ukraine's citizens know with whom they could be sharing the country's hydrocarbon wealth?
It took many months for the people behind the infamous RosUkrEnergo to reveal themselves. President Yushchenko flatly denied knowing who they were. Hopefully Integrum's backers will not be so shy.
Vanco's bankers?
In recent days PM Tymoshenko has repeatedly claimed that when president Yushchenko 'blessed' a deal giving US petroleum company Vanco Energy the green light to commence oil and gas projects in the Black sea off the Crimean coast, it was a
betrayal of national interests would
amount to a 'RosUkrEnergo-2'.
She has
publicly asserted that Vanco’s Ukrainian off-shoot, Vanco Prekerchensa Ltd., is an offshore structure registered to four girls, and that the company has only token assets of 12,000 hryven [about $6,000].
According to
an item in 'Ukrainska Pravda', Vanco’s senior vice president Jeffrey Mitchell revealed today that Vanco's partner in its Kerch shelf project is DTEK, part of Rinat Akhmetov's SCM financial-industrial group. Vanco are the 'technical boys', while DTEK are the financial investor in the project.
Tymoshenko is enemy #1 for the Donetsk oligarchs, the biggest of whom is Akhmetov. She is trying to sink the recent Dniproenergo deal which enabled Akhmetov's group to significantly increase their oblenergo holdings. The deal had allegedly been 'approved' by the president, perhaps as a 'pay-off' for PoR agreeing to participate in last Autumn's elections after Yushchenko had contentiously dismissed the Verhkovna Rada last April.
Akhmetov, is
allegedly "interested in a second term of office for Yushchenko". One of his close allies, Boris Kolesnikov, is known to be quite chummy with head of the pres's secretariat, Viktor Baloha. Another, Raisa Bohatyryova, is secretary of the powerful National Security and Defence Council.
However, some other PoR big-shots, including Andriy Klyuev are not against some co-operation with BYuT on matters of Constitutional reform, while
others consider recent events in the VR to be the 'death-throes' of the democratic coalition.
No quick resolution of current political crisis in sight
After yesterday's stormy events in the VR, [see Tymoshenko's impromptu press briefing providing an explanation for BYuT's behaviour
here] a meeting between the president, premier, VR speaker, and leaders of the parliamentary fractions
took place today (Wednesday), but produced no result or compromise.
Leader of the Communist fraction, Petro Symonenko said, "The president did not make any suggestions at all about what measures can be adopted to stabilize the situation. Discussions did not take place constructively, but in actual fact were [just] arguments between members of the coalition."
PoR VR deputy Oleksandr Yefremov said, "The principal reason, in my opinion for BYuT's blocking [of parliament] is the removal of Semenyuk [head of the State Property Fund, whom Tymoshenko's government has replaced with one of their own - Andriy Portnov.] BYuT want to gain access to the sale of particularly tempting state enterprises - 'UkrTelekom', and Odessa Portside Plant."
Portnov himself is adamant that he will
not obey Yushchenko's edicts, adding that the sale of the OPP will take place on 20th May via open procedures, "Irrespective of the declarations of the closed stock company of Valentyna Petrivna [Semenyuk] and Viktor Andriyovych [Yushchenko]."
"Despite the hysterics of highly placed officials," three prospective investors have already paid in a deposit for the OPP, claimed Portnov.
Tonight Tymoshenko
took part in a public meeting supporting BYuT's candidate in Kyiv's mayoral elections, Oleksandr Turchynov. Her anti-Yushchenko rhetoric continues unabated.
Yesterday president Yushchenko failed to address the Ukrainian parliament and held a press briefing in one of the parliament's corridors. At his side were his press secretary Iryna Vannikova, National Security and Defence Council secretary, Raisa Bohatyryova, and... Valentyna Semenyuk.. [The good, the bad, and the ugly? or maybe 'Vitya's Angels'..only joking..only joking..]
Yushchenko
flew off to Great Britain later this afternoon, having given an interview to the BBC and to the British Sky news. A transcript is to appear on BBC websites.
Blocking of parliament by PoR for many days earlier this year only harmed their political standing...BYuT will be aware of this, so LEvko's hunch is that some kind of compromise will be made soon, but the bad blood will remain.
Rescuing a revolution
On Tuesday BYuT
blocked the working of the Ukrainian parliament [VR] and prevented President Yushchenko from making a state-of-the-nation speech, plunging the country into yet another crisis. Opposition Party of Regions deputy Nestor Shufrich considers that had BYuT not blocked parliament, then PoR would have. [Maybe they can come to some form of alternating shift-sharing arrangement..]
Seriously though, I reproduce
this piece, in full, from the latest 'Moscow Times', before it goes to 'subscribers only':
Rescuing a Revolution By Elmar Brok, Jas Gawronski and Charles TannockThere is no more depressing sight in politics than a leader who, desperate to cling to power, ruins his country in the process. By his recent actions, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko now looks like he has joined the long list of rulers who have sacrificed their country's future simply to prolong their misrule.
Yushchenko's recent moves in both politics and economics suggest that his instinct for self-preservation knows no limits. Once a proud supporter of the free market and the man who banished hyperinflation in Ukraine in the 1990s, Yushchenko has in recent weeks vetoed -- sometimes on flimsy grounds and sometimes for no stated reason at all -- a series of vital privatizations. He blocked the sale of regional energy companies, for example, because he claims that their privatization will threaten the country's "national security," though it is corrupt and incompetent state management of these companies that is threatening Ukraine's security by making it vulnerable to energy cutoffs.
Yushchenko seems motivated only by a desire to damage his prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, whom he perceives as the biggest threat to his re-election in 2010. To undermine the Tymoshenko Cabinet even more, Ukraine's Central Bank, under the leadership of a presidential crony, is pursuing a policy that is importing high inflation. When confronted about this, Volodymyr Stelmakh, the bank's governor, is said to have told Tymoshenko that his policies would destroy her government before they broke the back of the economy.
In politics, too, Yushchenko is playing with fire, having lost the support of most of Our Ukraine, the party he created. Since his victory in 2004, Yushchenko's popularity ratings have plummeted to about 8 percent. As a result, the party has been reduced to junior-partner status in Tymoshenko's coalition government.
Instead of trying to recover support by pursuing the reforms and privatizations that he promised during the Orange Revolution, Yushchenko is planning to take the few members of Our Ukraine that he still controls and forge a strategic alliance with the Party of the Regions, the very party that opposed the country's turn to democracy and an open society. To clinch this deal, the Party of the Regions would dump their unelectable leader, Viktor Yanukovych, as their presidential candidate and adopt Yushchenko as their standard-bearer.
Yushchenko has only himself to blame for his political predicament. His decision in 2006 to bring Yanukovych out of the wilderness and back into the premiership was an act from which he has never recovered. Only when Yanukovych sought to use the parliament to strip the president of his powers did Yushchenko summon the will to fight back, dismissing Yanukovych's government and calling for a special election last year. That election, however, was won by Tymoshenko, who has parlayed her return to power into a commanding lead in the polls for the coming presidential election.
Throttling Ukraine's economy and political system need not have been Yushchenko's legacy. After he came to power in 2005 on a huge wave of popular support, he started off well. The economy was growing, and he and Tymoshenko began to tackle the country's black hole of corruption. Moreover, he seemed genuinely committed to reconciliation between the country's Russian-speaking east and Ukrainian-speaking west. Throughout his presidency, he has overseen fair elections and a free and vibrant press.
But Yushchenko's chronic dithering and poor political judgment consistently undermine his fundamental democratic credentials. Sadly, he now appears poised to make another serious political miscalculation, because he is backing a radical constitutional reform aimed at creating a purely presidential system. That proposal has no chance of success in the parliament. Yushchenko sought to circumvent the parliament by way of a national referendum, but the Constitutional Court has ruled that only the parliament may determine how constitutional reform is to occur.
Although Yushchenko seems unable to save himself politically, Europe can help both him and Ukraine's democracy. Tymoshenko is prepared to offer Yushchenko a compromise that Europe's leaders should urge him to accept. Her proposals for constitutional reform would make Ukraine a pure parliamentary republic, while retaining a president as head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces. Yushchenko can yet secure an honorable place in history if, instead of undermining and obstructing Tymoshenko at every turn, he supports her anti-corruption initiatives and constitutional reform, the latter aimed at bringing the country's political system closer to Europe's parliamentary democracies as well as to facilitate the country's European integration.
Given that Yushchenko has almost no chance of winning the next presidential election, Tymoshenko has made him a generous offer. If accepted, it promises Ukraine, which aspires to European Union membership and is currently negotiating a free trade agreement with the EU, the stable, effective and democratic government that it needs. Europe's leaders, who helped broker a peaceful and democratic end to the Orange Revolution, should once again help Kiev avoid political deadlock.
Elmar Brok, Jas Gawronski and Charles Tannock are members of the EU parliament [well-meaning friends of Ukraine..LEvko]
