Vice speaker of Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada Mykola Tomenko has said less than one third of the members of parliament actually voted for pension reform, therefore the opposition has every reason to file a motion with the Constitutional Court to declare the law unconstitutional.
"In reality, less than one third of deputies voted for the pension reform," he said at Friday briefing in Kyiv.
He said that out of the 248 deputies whose votes were cast for the reform, only 143 were present in the hall – they were people registered during the evening session but "in reality there were even less of them."
Tomenko, elected to the Rada as a member of the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko, said that this may be a weighty argument for the president to veto the pension reform and for the Constitutional Court.
"I believe that the opposition will use all of its arguments to prevent this reform from becoming law and being enforced in Ukraine," he said.
The Ukrainian Communist Party also said it hopes that President Viktor Yanukovych will veto the pension reform.
"We hope that the president will impose his veto and we will cancel all these provisions concerning changes in retirement age," Communist deputy Yevhen Tsarkov told the press on Friday.
He said that "those who voted for it looked like beaten dogs because they realize that all of them will have to go back to their districts and run in the 2012 election."
"The absolute majority of those who voted for the bill strongly believe that [President] Yanukovych will veto the bill, that it will be returned to parliament and the same thing will happen to it as happened to the Tax Code," he said.
