• Українська
  • Русский
  • English
Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Passing Gas

29 May, 1999 - 00:00

Occasionally a brief news item sheds more light on the local
scheme of things than tomes of information. One such item in this issue
is Vitaly Kniazhansky's feature on the Naftohaz Ukrayiny (Oil & Gas
of Ukraine) National Stock Company. One should note that the word "stock"
in the enterprise's name does not mean that there are private stockholders;
the thing is fully state owned. Rather, it buys the stock of its partially
or wholly privatized customers, oblast natural gas monopolies, thereby
in a sense at least partially de-privatizing them.

As has been noted on more than one occasion, the National Security and
Defense Council, headed by the President and run by his faithful Volodymyr
Horbulin, decides who can trade in energy (oil, natural gas, and electricity),
in other words which monopoly can sell how much to whom. From Kniazhansky
we learn that many of the 300 customers "capable of paying" that have been
"assigned" to Naftohaz prefer to buy their gas elsewhere because they can
get it cheaper. That is precisely what a market economy would encourage
them to do.

It is not what the Ukrainian government will let them do. To check the
"impudence" of such niggardly enterprises unwilling to subsidize the state
monopoly, the Cabinet of Ministers has adopted a new regulation to force
them to accept minimum prices for natural gas making it not worthwhile
for them to buy from anyone other than Naftohaz. If this is what passes
for reform these days in Ukraine, something would seem not to smell quite
right.

 

Rubric: