Ukrainian lawmakers finish their last full session week of 2016, leaving plenty of loose ends. One accomplishment came when the Verkhovna Rada passed a $30 billion budget that is mostly balanced.
But lawmakers still failed to pass legislation that the reform-minded activists wanted. Lawmakers also did not check off most items from the list of demands of the International Monetary Fund.
However, experts believe that the approval of 2017 budget that meets IMF’s requirements, together with the nationalization of the PrivatBank on Dec. 18, will be enough for Ukraine to receive a $1.3 billion IMF loan as early as January.
Parliament will be back in the session hall on Jan. 17. Until then, lawmakers have time scheduled for committee work and meeting with voters.
The last week
Beside the budget, lawmakers also approved a law governing the High Council of Justice. The aim is to help prosecute judges who made illegal rulings against activists of the EuroMaidan Revolutiont that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych in 20133.
The budget, meanwhile, envisions national spending of $29.8 billion on revenues of $27.2 billion. Gross domestic product is expected to increase 3 percent in 2017 — to just above $100 billion — while inflation is projected to be only 8.1 percent.
Andriy Hevko, advocacy manager at the Reanimation Package of Reforms, told the Kyiv Post that the budget’s passage — erratic and late at night — means the public won’t be able to asses it until “we see all the final documents.”
Oleksandra Betliy, a leading research fellow at the Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting, also told the Kyiv Post that it’s hard to comment on the budget without knowing the details.
Unfinished business
Among the unfinished business: Draft laws that would speed up the process of government decentralization. Ukraine’s parliament rejected an important bill on decentralization on Dec. 6.
The laws, passed in first reading in September, had been intended to help towns and villages set up more than 100 so-called amalgamated communities for self-administration by the end of the year.
Hevko praised Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, who recently urged government and parliament to prepare the decentralization package and to pass it, but it didn’t yet work.
Another step Ukraine’s parliament failed to make was to grant the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine with the right to wiretap the suspects independently from the Security Service of Ukraine or any other law enforcement bodies.
Parliament also did not pass the technical draft law that would eliminate inconsistency between the civil service law and bills that oversee the work of government, as well as other state bodies. The civil service law came into effect on May 1.
Vadym Miskyi, head of advocacy department at Reanimation Package of Reforms, criticized parliament for being unable to start electoral reform.
“The new law about parliamentary elections with the open party tickets stay one of the loudest unfulfilled promise of the new authorities,” he told the Kyiv Post. “Besides that, the Rada and president failed to agree on renewal of the Central Election Commission members.”
The authority of most of the commission’s members expired two years ago, while the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine declared its head Mykhailo Okhendovskyi a suspect in the criminal proceedings in the graft case.
Miskyi also pointed out that Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko vetoed the legislation from the ecology package that was supposed to become Ukraine’s first step towards implementation of European ecological standards. In his words, the pig farmers were to blame for the move, as they persuaded president not to support the reform. The laws would have made the pig farms to undergo transparent evaluation of the ecological risks from their functioning.
The latest IMF memorandum from September also contained other demands, most of which Ukraine still has not fulfilled.
Among those requirements are to design legislation on the market of agricultural land, set up the mechanism of the utility tariffs adjustment, publish the full list of the state enterprises with the estimation whether or not each of them have or have not to be privatized, to carry out the pension reform, as well as to merge the tax and custom services.
Kyiv Post staff writer Alyona Zhuk can be reached at [email protected]
