You're reading: Lutsenko quits as head of Bloc of Poroshenko faction in parliament

The fallout from the passing by parliament of a controversial law on converting dollar loans into hryvnia looked to have claimed its first political casualty on July 3 as head of the pro-presidential Bloc of Poroshenko faction in parliament Yury Lutsenko announced his resignation.

Lutesnko’s
press secretary, Larisa Sarhan, broke the news on Facebook with a terse post
reading: “
MP Yuriy Lutsenko has written a letter of resignation from the post of chairman
of the parliamentary faction of the Block Petro Poroshenko.”

Right after the vote on the law on converting foreign currency loans to
hryvnia late on July 2, Lutsenko criticized the measure in a statement released
online, in which he said the law “benefits at maximum a few tens of thousands
of citizens, but 40 million will lose out. The implementation of this law will
inevitably lead to a jump in the exchange rate.”

He said this would also have implications for the country’s national
security and its future prospects.

Soon after news of Lutsenko’s resignation broke, the deputy head of the
Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, MP Ihor Kononenko, played down the news, saying that
Lutsenko’s decision to quit had been “emotional” and that the party had asked
him to stay on.

Lutsenko himself could not be reached for comments by phone as of the
time this report was published.

Lutsenko had fiercely opposed the loan conversion law, which would force
banks to convert the foreign currency loans of citizens into hryvnias at the
rate in effect when the loan was taken out. In comments reported by Ukrainian
online new site Censor.net, he also said the voting on the law had been
illegal, as several lawmakers whose votes were recorded were actually out of
the country at the time.

Lutsenko, a close ally of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, had
headed the eponymous faction in parliament since last October’s parliamentary
elections, when he was elected to the legislature on the bloc’s party list.

One of the leading figures of Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, Lutsenko
served as Ukraine’s first civilian Interior Minister from February 2005. He was
jailed in December 2010 during the presidency of ousted Ukrainian leader Viktor
Yanukovych under charges of corruption, of which he was convicted on Feb. 27
2012, but he was pardoned and released by Yanukovych on April 7, 2013 on health
grounds.

Lutsenko always denied wrongdoing and said his conviction was based on
trumped-up charges, a position that many in the West and in Ukraine also shared.

He was appointed as a non-staff adviser to Poroshenko on June
17, 2014 and also was an adviser to acting President Oleksandr Turchynov in the
run-up to Ukraine’s post-revolution presidential elections on May 25 last year.

Kyiv Post editor Euan
MacDonald can be reached at [email protected]