Multinational denies it bribed Kozachenko; Former deputy prime ministers remains in jail
The Ukrainian subsidiary of Syngenta, a multinational agrochemical company, has denied suggestions that jailed former Deputy Prime Minister Leonid Kozachenko received bribes from its predecessor companies.
“This simply is not true,” Syngenta General Director Igor Kowal told the Post on April 8. “These allegations do not correspond with reality and we flatly reject them.”
The latest charge was brought on April 5 by the General Prosecutor’s Office, which claimed Kozachenko solicited and received stock valued at Hr 1.5 million from Novartis Agro and AstraZeneca in 2000. The agrochemical companies were shareholders in Ukragrobiznes, a joint venture then managed by Kozachenko.
Even before the bribery charge, the Kozachenko case had already drawn the attention of lawmakers, grain market players and foreign diplomats, who have expressed concerns that it marks the start of a reintroduction of state control over the grain market.
Kozachenko was arrested on March 24 on charges of abuse of office and tax evasion after President Leonid Kuchma ordered an investigation into the causes of volatility on the grain market.
A Kyiv appeals court on April 7 upheld an earlier ruling by Kyiv Pechersk District Court authorizing Kozachenko’s pre-trial detention.
Judge Serhy Slinko ruled that if Kozachenko was released pending trial, he could prevent prosecutors from conducting an impartial investigation.
Through his lawyers, Kozachenko has denied the charges, which he says represent an attempt to restore the inefficient command-administrative system of managing the agricultural sector.
“The actions of the GPO discredit the country’s [grain] export policy and undermine Ukraine’s international reputation,” he said.
Kozachenko, 47, is a former collective farm chairman from the Fastiv district of Kyiv Oblast. In 1991, he was appointed to run the marketing and licensing directorate of the Agriculture Ministry. He went on to head the Ukrainian League of Agro-Industrial Complex Entrepreneurs for eight years before becoming president of the Ukrainian Agrarian Confederation in 1999.
Kozachenko also ran Ukragrobiznes, a joint venture formed in 1991 by a consortium of Western agrochemical companies, two Ukrainian banks and the Agriculture Ministry. The enterprise received pesticides from Western companies and sold them on credit to farms.
Vladislav Babovsky, who heads the Kyiv Oblast department of the plant protection inspection bureau of the Agriculture Ministry, told the Post that in the mid-1990s Ukragrobiznes dominated the commercial agrochemicals market.
Ukragrobiznes ran into difficulties after the 1998 financial crisis, when farmers were unable to pay for pesticide purchases.
Novartis Agro and Zeneca Ltd., wholly owned subsidiaries of Switzerland’s Novartis AG and Britain’s AstraZeneca, liquidated their stakes in Ukragrobiznes by gifting them to Kozachenko before the parent companies merged in 2000 to create Syngenta. The resulting company’s global sales amounted to $6.2 billion last year.
Kowal said the decision to give Kozachenko 36 percent of Ukragrobiznes’ stock was made at a meeting of the venture’s shareholders. He said the legal validity of the transfer was confirmed by two law firms, Baker & McKenzie and Klitochenko, Minin & Partners.
“The stock given to Kozachenko had a negative market value because agricultural producers could not pay for products supplied by Ukragrobiznes,” said Kowal.
Kowal added that Ukragrobiznes still owes about $25 million to Western agrochemical suppliers. He said the debt to Syngenta amounts to about $5 million.
Syngenta Financial Director Yury Zastavny told the Post on April 9 that his company had not received formal notification from the GPO about the bribery charges.
“We have responded to the allegations based on media reports,” Zastavny said.
Kozachenko attorney Ihor Usenko told Interfax-Ukraine on April 7 that prosecutors formally presented bribery charges on April 5.
A GPO spokesperson told the Post on April 9 they had no information about the bribery charge. Polina Bashkina, press secretary to General Prosecutor Syvatoslav Pyskun, was unavailable for comment.
Kozachenko left Ukragrobiznes in June 2001 to become deputy prime minister for agricultural policy in the government of Anatoly Kinakh. He was dismissed last November after Kinakh was replaced by Viktor Yanukovych.
The case against Kozachenko is one of dozens opened by prosecutors after Kuchma ordered the General Prosecutor’s Office on March 13 to investigate abuses in the grain market. The probe began after oblast governors began prohibiting the shipment of grain outside their regions in early March citing shortages.
Andry Yarmak, an analyst at APK-Inform, an agricultural news agency, said that bread prices began rising throughout the country in February with flour prices jumping almost 20 percent. He said if prices continued to climb then bread price hikes would be unavoidable.
According to Yarmak, the country harvested 38.5 million tons of grain in 2002. He said that exports in the 2002/2003 growing season would likely total 11.5 million tons. The season runs from July to June. Domestic consumption during this period is expected to be 28.5 million tons. Yarmak said the resulting deficit of around 1.5 million tons could easily be made up from state reserves and undeclared stocks held by producers and traders.
Kozachenko’s arrest followed reports in state-run media that farmers had been coerced by the government to sell too much of their grain to exporters last year.
Volodymr Klimenko, the general director of the Ukrainian Grain Association, a trade association uniting grain traders, told the Post that the charge is unjustified.
“Companies or government officials certainly should not bear the responsibility if the official statistics turn out to be inaccurate,” said Klimenko.
He said that the arrest of Kozachenko would likely have a negative impact on the volume of private financing of the agricultural sector.
On April 4, 183 lawmakers, including 24 deputies belonging to pro-presidential factions, asked the GPO to ensure that the investigation of the Kozachenko case was objective and independent. The request was made a day after 247 deputies supported a bill to create an ad hoc commission to examine the state of the nation’s grain market.
Agriculture Minister Serhy Ryzhuk said on April 8 that a presidential decree on regulating the grain market was being prepared. He insisted, however, that the decree would not introduce “limitations or administrative regulation of the market.” He said it was designed to “stimulate the actions of the executive branch in creating a civilized grain market.”
He said that the need for regulation is clear from the fluctuations in prices, harvest yields and export volumes.
“Everyone loses from this – producers and traders,” he said.
The arrest of Kozachenko and the prospect of re-introduction of state regulation of the country’s grain have alarmed Western diplomats.
Among those expressing concern was Canadian Ambassador Andrew Robinson.
Robinson was quoted by Interfax-Ukraine on April 3 as saying that recent agricultural reforms had contributed significantly to the nation’s economic growth in 2002.
“Small- and medium-scale agribusinesses became lucrative due to the existence of a free market without help from the state,” Robinson said. “I know that Kozachenko was one of the main defenders of the reform policy in agriculture.”
Robinson noted that Canada has launched two projects worth $8.9 million in Ukraine’s agricultural sector.
“When we announced the projects, we underlined the correlation between our decisions and further reforms in agriculture,” Robinson said.
для сравнения [статья без фактов]
Grain is Gain
by Ivan Khokhotva
Transitions Online
KIEV, Ukraine--Every day, Kiev’s busy traffic grinds to a halt as senior Ukrainian government members whiz past in their limos, escorted by police cars. For the privileged few who are accustomed to having the road miles ahead of them ending up in a dingy jail cell must come as a shock of a lifetime. That, though, is what Leonid Kozachenko, a hapless former deputy prime minister for agriculture, is now having to cope with after a president-ordered inquiry into reported grain shortages in parts of Ukraine.
The former minister, who held office for six months in 2002, is accused of forcing farmers to sell their produce when prices were in a trough and allowing too much of last year’s bumper crop to be exported. Ukraine, it turns out, may soon have to import grain in order to keep bread prices at bay, and somehow it is all Kozachenko’s fault. He is also facing charges of bribery and tax evasion dating back to the time before he took office.
Yet in a country plagued by corruption and cronyism, Kozachenko, who was arrested on 24 March, is only the third bigwig to have come so badly unstuck. The first two were arrested either after fleeing the country with stolen millions (former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, who is awaiting trial in the United States on money-laundering charges) or after accusing the authorities of corruption and misrule (former deputy minister for energy Yuliya Tymoshenko).
No wonder then that the question on experts’ minds is not whether Kozachenko is actually guilty but why he was singled out for a public humiliation and whether there is a hidden agenda that might explain his arrest. Some believe that the government, which has always seen keeping bread prices low as a political imperative, is simply trying to find a scapegoat to blame for an apparent failure of the country's maturing grain market. Many wonder, however, if the reported shortages are being deliberately hyped up to attack the free market mechanisms that have allegedly caused them.
FARMING FORTUNES
Farming in Ukraine, a country once known as the breadbasket of Europe, went into a nosedive after independence in 1991. The cash-strapped government could no longer afford to plow huge subsidies into inefficient collective farms, and private farming was strangled by bureaucracy and unfriendly legislation. But after a series of much-needed laws were adopted three years ago, introducing private land ownership and facilitating commercial credit for farmers, Ukrainian agriculture has experienced something of a renaissance. Bumper crops in 2001 and 2002 ended the country’s dependence on grain imports and put it back in the league of exporters. Last year up to 10 million tonnes of grain was sold abroad, out of the total crop of about 40 million.
From a bottomless pit agriculture has turned into something of a cash cow--but not always for farmers.
Attempts to liberalize the grain market, adopt international quality standards and introduce commodity exchanges to ensure that farmers get a fair price for their produce have been hampered by government bureaucracy. There are powerful vested interests in keeping the market closed to outsiders and not allowing competition among grain traders to drive prices up.
Kozachenko, prosecutors say, acted in the interests of these traders by vetting export deals at the peak of the grain supply immediately after the harvest season, when the prices were at the bottom. “About five million tonnes of grain, half of all the exports, was sold when market conditions least favored farmers, and the pressure to sell was coming from Kozachenko,” said Tetyana Kornyakova, deputy prosecutor-general. Indeed, so much grain was sold abroad, prosecutors reckon, that the country may not have enough stocks to tide it over until the next crop.
Most experts agree, however, that the charges simply don’t add up. They point out that the oversupply of grain on the domestic market at the time was up to 15 million tonnes. With no budget funds for state interventions to support prices, and no mechanism of futures contracts in place, stimulating exports was the only way to keep farmers afloat, analysts say. Had Kozachenko tried to block export contracts until grain traders were prepared to offer a better deal, the domestic prices would have collapsed even further and Ukraine would have lost its share on the world markets.
Some insiders even doubt that there is actually a shortage of grain in the country. They say the granaries are far from empty, and that the owners simply don’t want to sell now, when prices are only just rising out of the trough, in the hope that prices will pick up further. Up to 40 percent of this year’s winter crops have been damaged by the harsh winter and will have to be re-sown, increasing demand for last year’s grain and reducing the chances of a grain glut this year.
A HIDDEN AGENDA?
Why then all this hype about man-made grain shortages and the former minister’s dramatic arrest? Analysts believe one distinct possibility is a power struggle between political clans who would like to put their own men in charge of lucrative industries. Picking on easy targets to advertise the administration’s anti-corruption drive without treading on important toes is another.
More ominously though, experts both in Ukraine and abroad fear that by trumping up the alleged failure of the grain market and, by implication, market reforms in agriculture, the government is paving the way for a restoration of the corrupt and inefficient administrative command system in the sector.
Grain traders and farmers alike were dismayed when the prosecutor mused aloud on national television shortly before Kozachenko’s arrest about the possibility of reviving the old Soviet system of state contracts, awarded to (or foisted on) farms at the bureaucrats’ discretion and at rock-bottom prices. As the 2004 presidential election draws nearer, the temptation in some quarters to milk Ukraine’s farming for campaign funds could become irresistible, some fear. And Kozachenko, who is not affiliated with any of Ukraine’s competing political and business clans, could be a convenient candidate for the role of the villain in a campaign to discredit agricultural reform.
A very similar view was voiced by the Ukrainian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, a business association, which described Kozachenko’s arrest as a “trumped-up case launched as part of the heated political struggle in the country.”
“Instead of working professionally and systematically to create a modern grain market infrastructure, attempts are being made to discredit grain traders,” the union said in a statement. “A search for a professional solution to a real economic problem has been substituted by a search for a scapegoat. This significantly reduces the effectiveness of land reform.”
The scandal has already spilt over the country’s borders. Canada, a major sponsor of Ukraine’s agricultural reform, has expressed its concern at Kozachenko’s arrest and hinted that its aid programs in the sector could be suspended. The Canadian ambassador in Kiev, Andrew Robinson, has described the former deputy prime minister as “one of the key proponents of the policy of reforms in agriculture.” If the grain shortages are indeed real, the right way to tackle the problem would be to accelerate reforms instead of reversing them and punishing their advocates, the ambassador said. “Reforms have turned agriculture into a locomotive of Ukraine’s economic growth,” the ambassador added. “Small and medium producers have started making profits thanks to a free market, without the help of the state.”
And that, skeptics note, is exactly what the state may be finding so hard to swallow.
mikola medoliz pomer na 52-om kilometer trassy kyiv - chernihiv - novy yarylovichi uzhe nikogo ne interesuet.
pochemu net?
За повідомленнями ЗМІ, 4 липня 1999 року о 5 годині 30 хвилин на 52 кілометрі траси Чернігів-Київ, в автомобільній катастрофі загинув на 34 році життя перший заступник голови Національного агентства України з питань розвитку і європейської інтеграції, відповідальний секретар валютно-кредитної ради Кабінету Міністрів України Медолиз Микола Миколайович, який повертаючись з ділової поїздки, заснув за кермом...
Медолиз в силу своєї посади мав матеріали про нецільове використання коштів Державного валютного фонду України, в тому числі і про викрадення Л.Кучмою, А.Лобовим, Ю.Звягільським 12 000 000 нім. марок.
У своїй заяві мати загиблого Медолиз Таміла Порфиріївна пише, що після ознайомлення з матеріалами розслідування вона зрозуміла, що її сина було вбито. Його підвезли до автомашини уже мертвого, поклали від неї за 4,8 м, інсинувавши автомобільну катастрофу. Їй категорично заборонили робити будь-які виписки із кримінальної справи.
Відповіді
2003.04.10 | line305b
Подписку требуют.. запостьте, пожалуйста, статью сюда.. (-)
2003.04.10 | Roman
Re: Подписку требуют.. запостьте, пожалуйста, статью сюда.. (-)
Grain drainBy PETER BYRNE
Post Staff Writer
Multinational denies it bribed Kozachenko; Former deputy prime ministers remains in jail
The Ukrainian subsidiary of Syngenta, a multinational agrochemical company, has denied suggestions that jailed former Deputy Prime Minister Leonid Kozachenko received bribes from its predecessor companies.
“This simply is not true,” Syngenta General Director Igor Kowal told the Post on April 8. “These allegations do not correspond with reality and we flatly reject them.”
The latest charge was brought on April 5 by the General Prosecutor’s Office, which claimed Kozachenko solicited and received stock valued at Hr 1.5 million from Novartis Agro and AstraZeneca in 2000. The agrochemical companies were shareholders in Ukragrobiznes, a joint venture then managed by Kozachenko.
Even before the bribery charge, the Kozachenko case had already drawn the attention of lawmakers, grain market players and foreign diplomats, who have expressed concerns that it marks the start of a reintroduction of state control over the grain market.
Kozachenko was arrested on March 24 on charges of abuse of office and tax evasion after President Leonid Kuchma ordered an investigation into the causes of volatility on the grain market.
A Kyiv appeals court on April 7 upheld an earlier ruling by Kyiv Pechersk District Court authorizing Kozachenko’s pre-trial detention.
Judge Serhy Slinko ruled that if Kozachenko was released pending trial, he could prevent prosecutors from conducting an impartial investigation.
Through his lawyers, Kozachenko has denied the charges, which he says represent an attempt to restore the inefficient command-administrative system of managing the agricultural sector.
“The actions of the GPO discredit the country’s [grain] export policy and undermine Ukraine’s international reputation,” he said.
Kozachenko, 47, is a former collective farm chairman from the Fastiv district of Kyiv Oblast. In 1991, he was appointed to run the marketing and licensing directorate of the Agriculture Ministry. He went on to head the Ukrainian League of Agro-Industrial Complex Entrepreneurs for eight years before becoming president of the Ukrainian Agrarian Confederation in 1999.
Kozachenko also ran Ukragrobiznes, a joint venture formed in 1991 by a consortium of Western agrochemical companies, two Ukrainian banks and the Agriculture Ministry. The enterprise received pesticides from Western companies and sold them on credit to farms.
Vladislav Babovsky, who heads the Kyiv Oblast department of the plant protection inspection bureau of the Agriculture Ministry, told the Post that in the mid-1990s Ukragrobiznes dominated the commercial agrochemicals market.
Ukragrobiznes ran into difficulties after the 1998 financial crisis, when farmers were unable to pay for pesticide purchases.
Novartis Agro and Zeneca Ltd., wholly owned subsidiaries of Switzerland’s Novartis AG and Britain’s AstraZeneca, liquidated their stakes in Ukragrobiznes by gifting them to Kozachenko before the parent companies merged in 2000 to create Syngenta. The resulting company’s global sales amounted to $6.2 billion last year.
Kowal said the decision to give Kozachenko 36 percent of Ukragrobiznes’ stock was made at a meeting of the venture’s shareholders. He said the legal validity of the transfer was confirmed by two law firms, Baker & McKenzie and Klitochenko, Minin & Partners.
“The stock given to Kozachenko had a negative market value because agricultural producers could not pay for products supplied by Ukragrobiznes,” said Kowal.
Kowal added that Ukragrobiznes still owes about $25 million to Western agrochemical suppliers. He said the debt to Syngenta amounts to about $5 million.
Syngenta Financial Director Yury Zastavny told the Post on April 9 that his company had not received formal notification from the GPO about the bribery charges.
“We have responded to the allegations based on media reports,” Zastavny said.
Kozachenko attorney Ihor Usenko told Interfax-Ukraine on April 7 that prosecutors formally presented bribery charges on April 5.
A GPO spokesperson told the Post on April 9 they had no information about the bribery charge. Polina Bashkina, press secretary to General Prosecutor Syvatoslav Pyskun, was unavailable for comment.
Kozachenko left Ukragrobiznes in June 2001 to become deputy prime minister for agricultural policy in the government of Anatoly Kinakh. He was dismissed last November after Kinakh was replaced by Viktor Yanukovych.
The case against Kozachenko is one of dozens opened by prosecutors after Kuchma ordered the General Prosecutor’s Office on March 13 to investigate abuses in the grain market. The probe began after oblast governors began prohibiting the shipment of grain outside their regions in early March citing shortages.
Andry Yarmak, an analyst at APK-Inform, an agricultural news agency, said that bread prices began rising throughout the country in February with flour prices jumping almost 20 percent. He said if prices continued to climb then bread price hikes would be unavoidable.
According to Yarmak, the country harvested 38.5 million tons of grain in 2002. He said that exports in the 2002/2003 growing season would likely total 11.5 million tons. The season runs from July to June. Domestic consumption during this period is expected to be 28.5 million tons. Yarmak said the resulting deficit of around 1.5 million tons could easily be made up from state reserves and undeclared stocks held by producers and traders.
Kozachenko’s arrest followed reports in state-run media that farmers had been coerced by the government to sell too much of their grain to exporters last year.
Volodymr Klimenko, the general director of the Ukrainian Grain Association, a trade association uniting grain traders, told the Post that the charge is unjustified.
“Companies or government officials certainly should not bear the responsibility if the official statistics turn out to be inaccurate,” said Klimenko.
He said that the arrest of Kozachenko would likely have a negative impact on the volume of private financing of the agricultural sector.
On April 4, 183 lawmakers, including 24 deputies belonging to pro-presidential factions, asked the GPO to ensure that the investigation of the Kozachenko case was objective and independent. The request was made a day after 247 deputies supported a bill to create an ad hoc commission to examine the state of the nation’s grain market.
Agriculture Minister Serhy Ryzhuk said on April 8 that a presidential decree on regulating the grain market was being prepared. He insisted, however, that the decree would not introduce “limitations or administrative regulation of the market.” He said it was designed to “stimulate the actions of the executive branch in creating a civilized grain market.”
He said that the need for regulation is clear from the fluctuations in prices, harvest yields and export volumes.
“Everyone loses from this – producers and traders,” he said.
The arrest of Kozachenko and the prospect of re-introduction of state regulation of the country’s grain have alarmed Western diplomats.
Among those expressing concern was Canadian Ambassador Andrew Robinson.
Robinson was quoted by Interfax-Ukraine on April 3 as saying that recent agricultural reforms had contributed significantly to the nation’s economic growth in 2002.
“Small- and medium-scale agribusinesses became lucrative due to the existence of a free market without help from the state,” Robinson said. “I know that Kozachenko was one of the main defenders of the reform policy in agriculture.”
Robinson noted that Canada has launched two projects worth $8.9 million in Ukraine’s agricultural sector.
“When we announced the projects, we underlined the correlation between our decisions and further reforms in agriculture,” Robinson said.
для сравнения [статья без фактов]
Grain is Gain
by Ivan Khokhotva
Transitions Online
KIEV, Ukraine--Every day, Kiev’s busy traffic grinds to a halt as senior Ukrainian government members whiz past in their limos, escorted by police cars. For the privileged few who are accustomed to having the road miles ahead of them ending up in a dingy jail cell must come as a shock of a lifetime. That, though, is what Leonid Kozachenko, a hapless former deputy prime minister for agriculture, is now having to cope with after a president-ordered inquiry into reported grain shortages in parts of Ukraine.
The former minister, who held office for six months in 2002, is accused of forcing farmers to sell their produce when prices were in a trough and allowing too much of last year’s bumper crop to be exported. Ukraine, it turns out, may soon have to import grain in order to keep bread prices at bay, and somehow it is all Kozachenko’s fault. He is also facing charges of bribery and tax evasion dating back to the time before he took office.
Yet in a country plagued by corruption and cronyism, Kozachenko, who was arrested on 24 March, is only the third bigwig to have come so badly unstuck. The first two were arrested either after fleeing the country with stolen millions (former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, who is awaiting trial in the United States on money-laundering charges) or after accusing the authorities of corruption and misrule (former deputy minister for energy Yuliya Tymoshenko).
No wonder then that the question on experts’ minds is not whether Kozachenko is actually guilty but why he was singled out for a public humiliation and whether there is a hidden agenda that might explain his arrest. Some believe that the government, which has always seen keeping bread prices low as a political imperative, is simply trying to find a scapegoat to blame for an apparent failure of the country's maturing grain market. Many wonder, however, if the reported shortages are being deliberately hyped up to attack the free market mechanisms that have allegedly caused them.
FARMING FORTUNES
Farming in Ukraine, a country once known as the breadbasket of Europe, went into a nosedive after independence in 1991. The cash-strapped government could no longer afford to plow huge subsidies into inefficient collective farms, and private farming was strangled by bureaucracy and unfriendly legislation. But after a series of much-needed laws were adopted three years ago, introducing private land ownership and facilitating commercial credit for farmers, Ukrainian agriculture has experienced something of a renaissance. Bumper crops in 2001 and 2002 ended the country’s dependence on grain imports and put it back in the league of exporters. Last year up to 10 million tonnes of grain was sold abroad, out of the total crop of about 40 million.
From a bottomless pit agriculture has turned into something of a cash cow--but not always for farmers.
Attempts to liberalize the grain market, adopt international quality standards and introduce commodity exchanges to ensure that farmers get a fair price for their produce have been hampered by government bureaucracy. There are powerful vested interests in keeping the market closed to outsiders and not allowing competition among grain traders to drive prices up.
Kozachenko, prosecutors say, acted in the interests of these traders by vetting export deals at the peak of the grain supply immediately after the harvest season, when the prices were at the bottom. “About five million tonnes of grain, half of all the exports, was sold when market conditions least favored farmers, and the pressure to sell was coming from Kozachenko,” said Tetyana Kornyakova, deputy prosecutor-general. Indeed, so much grain was sold abroad, prosecutors reckon, that the country may not have enough stocks to tide it over until the next crop.
Most experts agree, however, that the charges simply don’t add up. They point out that the oversupply of grain on the domestic market at the time was up to 15 million tonnes. With no budget funds for state interventions to support prices, and no mechanism of futures contracts in place, stimulating exports was the only way to keep farmers afloat, analysts say. Had Kozachenko tried to block export contracts until grain traders were prepared to offer a better deal, the domestic prices would have collapsed even further and Ukraine would have lost its share on the world markets.
Some insiders even doubt that there is actually a shortage of grain in the country. They say the granaries are far from empty, and that the owners simply don’t want to sell now, when prices are only just rising out of the trough, in the hope that prices will pick up further. Up to 40 percent of this year’s winter crops have been damaged by the harsh winter and will have to be re-sown, increasing demand for last year’s grain and reducing the chances of a grain glut this year.
A HIDDEN AGENDA?
Why then all this hype about man-made grain shortages and the former minister’s dramatic arrest? Analysts believe one distinct possibility is a power struggle between political clans who would like to put their own men in charge of lucrative industries. Picking on easy targets to advertise the administration’s anti-corruption drive without treading on important toes is another.
More ominously though, experts both in Ukraine and abroad fear that by trumping up the alleged failure of the grain market and, by implication, market reforms in agriculture, the government is paving the way for a restoration of the corrupt and inefficient administrative command system in the sector.
Grain traders and farmers alike were dismayed when the prosecutor mused aloud on national television shortly before Kozachenko’s arrest about the possibility of reviving the old Soviet system of state contracts, awarded to (or foisted on) farms at the bureaucrats’ discretion and at rock-bottom prices. As the 2004 presidential election draws nearer, the temptation in some quarters to milk Ukraine’s farming for campaign funds could become irresistible, some fear. And Kozachenko, who is not affiliated with any of Ukraine’s competing political and business clans, could be a convenient candidate for the role of the villain in a campaign to discredit agricultural reform.
A very similar view was voiced by the Ukrainian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, a business association, which described Kozachenko’s arrest as a “trumped-up case launched as part of the heated political struggle in the country.”
“Instead of working professionally and systematically to create a modern grain market infrastructure, attempts are being made to discredit grain traders,” the union said in a statement. “A search for a professional solution to a real economic problem has been substituted by a search for a scapegoat. This significantly reduces the effectiveness of land reform.”
The scandal has already spilt over the country’s borders. Canada, a major sponsor of Ukraine’s agricultural reform, has expressed its concern at Kozachenko’s arrest and hinted that its aid programs in the sector could be suspended. The Canadian ambassador in Kiev, Andrew Robinson, has described the former deputy prime minister as “one of the key proponents of the policy of reforms in agriculture.” If the grain shortages are indeed real, the right way to tackle the problem would be to accelerate reforms instead of reversing them and punishing their advocates, the ambassador said. “Reforms have turned agriculture into a locomotive of Ukraine’s economic growth,” the ambassador added. “Small and medium producers have started making profits thanks to a free market, without the help of the state.”
And that, skeptics note, is exactly what the state may be finding so hard to swallow.
2003.04.10 | Kотти
новости versus мнение : - ) (-)
2003.04.10 | Шпигун
Re: новости versus мнение : - ) (-)
Он работает на СБУhttp://ln.com.ua/~byrne/ukraine.htm
2003.04.10 | peter byrne
Re: Почему наши журналисты не умеют так писать?
pamyat' slabaya.mikola medoliz pomer na 52-om kilometer trassy kyiv - chernihiv - novy yarylovichi uzhe nikogo ne interesuet.
pochemu net?
За повідомленнями ЗМІ, 4 липня 1999 року о 5 годині 30 хвилин на 52 кілометрі траси Чернігів-Київ, в автомобільній катастрофі загинув на 34 році життя перший заступник голови Національного агентства України з питань розвитку і європейської інтеграції, відповідальний секретар валютно-кредитної ради Кабінету Міністрів України Медолиз Микола Миколайович, який повертаючись з ділової поїздки, заснув за кермом...
Медолиз в силу своєї посади мав матеріали про нецільове використання коштів Державного валютного фонду України, в тому числі і про викрадення Л.Кучмою, А.Лобовим, Ю.Звягільським 12 000 000 нім. марок.
У своїй заяві мати загиблого Медолиз Таміла Порфиріївна пише, що після ознайомлення з матеріалами розслідування вона зрозуміла, що її сина було вбито. Його підвезли до автомашини уже мертвого, поклали від неї за 4,8 м, інсинувавши автомобільну катастрофу. Їй категорично заборонили робити будь-які виписки із кримінальної справи.