Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

The government's aggressive plans to review privatizations make us a little nervous

, recently announced by President Viktor Yushchenko’s administration, makes us a bit nervous.

It’s true that some recent “privatizations” of valuable state properties have been pure thievery, scams devised to steal plum industrial enterprises from the Ukrainian polity and put them in the pockets of a rapacious elite. But it’s also true that, if investigators start looking under rocks, they’ll find something fishy with almost every deal that led to great wealth in post-Soviet Ukraine. Where do the investigators plan to stop? In the wrong hands – the hands of, say, western Ukrainian hardliners out to end the Russified east’s long hold on power – such investigations could turn into a witchhunt that would damage the country and keep foreign money far, far away.

At first, Yushchenko and his people seemed to have the right idea. The list of properties up for revision, Yushchenko said on Feb. 15, “will be limited. It will be closed, in the sense that no one will continue it.” Then, on Feb. 16, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko announced that the government was now planning to review 3,000 privatizations. We had thought the number would be 30. Their ambitions had increased ten-fold. We hope they know their business.

Actually, there are good reasons beyond respect for property rights why the Yushchenko team should pursue privatization review only within limits. Super-rich Yushchenko allies like Tymoshenko, Emergency Minister David Zhvania and Petro Poroshenko, head of the National Security and Defense Council, probably wouldn’t feel much more comfortable with unrestricted investigations into the sources of Ukrainian private wealth than Pinchuk and Akhmetov do.