The Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament, by the end of the current plenary session could adopt a law on the exclusion of Ukrainian aircraft building companies from the list of companies that are to carry out state procurement tenders, according to Natalia Korolevska, head of the parliamentary committee for industrial and regulatory policies and entrepreneurship.
"We’ll try to do all we can for the law to be adopted by the end of the plenary session. The more the issue is postponed, the greater the prospects we lose. We hope that this will be done in May or in the first half of June," she said at a briefing on Wednesday.
"Today nothing is stopping [the parliament]: there is a draft law and the situation is clear both for the government and opposition representatives," she said.
Korolevska said that she had found support in this matter at the World Bank.
"I talked to World Bank representative Martin Raiser about the issue, and they agree that the requirement concerning state-run companies, and not concerning the national budget, has not been settled," she said.
She said the committee has asked the government to select a body to supervise the aircraft-building sector and be responsible for the preparation of a state program on the development of the aircraft building industry in Ukraine for the period until 2020.
The program should be based on key measures for aircraft building industry support worked out on the lines of global practice: compensation of interest rates on credits, strengthening of the state leasing system for long-term crediting of the sector, and exports support, she said.
Antonov Chief Designer and Director General Dmytro Kyva said that the application of the law on state procurement in the aviation industry does not take into account the specifics of the sector’s operations and leads to failure in the pace of production and the contracts signed.
He said that today the Ukrainian aviation industry is successfully developing international cooperation, including with Russia, China, India and the European Union.
