The State Pension Fund has reached a deal on publishing a weekly newspaper Pension Courier with billionaire's Rinat Akhmetov Segodnya Multimedia, a publishing house, on Dec. 30.
The fund
that is a source of financial support for Ukrainian retirees will pay Hr 10.4
million, or $660,000, for a year of publishing 175,000 Ukrainian-language
issues and 75,000 Russian-language ones, reports
Nashi Groshi, an investigative media outlet.
A tender that led to the deal clearly lacked competition, report adds. Tetyana Babych of the Finance Ministry’s press service had no comment, saying: “The Pension Fund is a stand-alone institution that makes its own decisions.”
The Pension Fund said in an email the newspaper covers general news as well as cultural affairs, which is why “one can’t deny this function is important for the society.” However, the fund emphasized it doesn’t pay salaries to the weekly’s journalists and doesn’t intervene in the editorial policy.
Olga Zakharchenko, a spokeswoman for Segodnya Multimedia, called the price of a deal cheap implying a “special partnership” with the Pension Fund. However, Kharkiv Na Dolonyah, another publishing house, offered fund a price which was ten times smaller, but the offer was turned down due to the inaccuracy in the submitted documents.
Despite
huge official circulation figures, the weekly is hard to find in the press kiosks and obviously doesn’t belong to the
league of country’s most popular publications. It’s unclear what the newspaper
contributes to the Pension Fund’s public mission.
This
year, Pension Fund will receive as much as $5.7 billion for its needs from the state
budget amid execution of the austerity policy by the government. Private
pension funds remain undeveloped, while the publicly run one is limited in
opportunities to manage its assets effectively due to the poor condition of
local securities market.
Therefore,
it’s a huge burden on the public budget.
Ukraine’s public pension
expenditures is 18 percent of gross domestic product, which is too high, while monthly pension
payments are way below the living standard, said Ivan Miklos, Slovakia’s former
deputy prime minister, in an interview
with the Kyiv Post.
He added that Ukraine
should raise the pension age that now stands at 55-60, while in Greece, the
subject of a global bailout program, it is 67. It is difficult to ask for further
financial aid while locals stop working at an age considered to be eligible
for having a full-time job in the Western countries.
Meanwhile,
in the developed economies pension funds are a major source of investments in
various securities, supporting the public financial system as well as private
businesses. Japanese
government Pension Investment Fund, world’s biggest one, manages $1.26
trillion in assets, keeping almost 50 percent of them in local bonds, 18
percent – in Japanese stocks and the rest in foreign securities.
Editor’s Note: The story has been updated on Jan. 14 to include the Pension Fund’s comment on the issue and on Jan. 15 to include the comment from Segodnya Multimedia.
Kyiv Post associate business editor Ivan Verstyuk can
be reached at [email protected].
