The Cabinet led by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has sold almost 5.6bn c m of Ukrainian gas using corruption schemes, the leader of Batkivshchyna Party Yulia Tymoshenko said on Oct 2.
“They were supposed to give the population 16.2bn c m but gave just 10.6bn c m. What did they do with those 5.6bn c m? They sold that gas to their own commercial structures, with the population supplied with imported gas instead. As a result, our consumers overpaid as much as20.3bn UAH or $1bn. This is what I call corruption,” Tymoshenko said.
She also criticized the Cabinet for its decision to raise the gas tariff. “The gas price has been raised by 5.5 times, with the share of the tax in the tariff raised eightfold. And this money will hardly be used for extraction. It will go into the pockets of those in Ukrgazdobycha and Ukrneft,” Tymoshenko said.
According to her, the new tariffs are taking from people the last money they have. “Today, a family in Ukraine spends as much as 35% of its incomes on bills,” Tymoshenko said.
Since early August, Ukraine has increased gas re-imports from Slovakia by 1.5 times to 33.7mn c m a day. According to Gazprom’s CEO Alexey Miller, Naftogaz is paying for this gas $20-30 more than it would pay for Russian gas.
As EADaily reported earlier, Ukrainian MP Serhiy Kaplin accused Yatsenyuk and his Cabinet of corruption. It was on his initiative that on Sept 26 the Pechersk District Court of Kiev obliged the Prosecutor General’s Office to lay a bribery charge against Yatsenyuk. The Ukrainian premier is reported to have taken a $3mn bribe for appointing Volodymyr Ischuk as Director General of Broadcasting, Radiocommunications & Television Concern (BRT). On Sept 29, Governor of Odessa Mikheil Saakashvili accused Yatsenyuk of pseudo-reforms and corruption. He said that Yatsenyuk was acting mostly in the interests of oligarchs like Rinat Akhmetov and Ihor Kolomoyskyi.
