Yuliya Tymoshenko’s “energy industry reform” could shorten the life of Yushchenko’s government
Deputy Premier Yuliya Tymoshenko repeated her sensational statement about Ukraine’s natural gas debts at a news conference. She claims they total $2.233 billion (including $492 million worth of penalties), increasing by $10 million daily, due to unauthorized pumping from Russian gas lines.
“Ukraine cannot refuse these debts,” said Ms. Tymoshenko when asked by The Day. “They are corroborated by books and records at the Russia’s Gasprom state company and inspection reports of Ukraine’s Naftohaz Ukrayiny national company.” At the same time, she noted that during the talks in Moscow she did not officially acknowledge the liabilities: “Let Naftohaz Ukrayiny do so, for this company ran up the debts.”
Yaroslav Vedmid, press service official at the Haz Ukrayiny Trading House, said that Naftohaz Ukrayiny had made a “serious political step” and handed The Day a press release. The document quotes Ihor Didenko, Deputy Chairman of NU Board, as saying that Ukraine “has no formalized public debt for gas” and that NU’s liabilities, including those still to be put on record, amount to a mere $837 million.
Yuliya Tymoshenko spared little grim colors in describing the situation in other sectors of the Ukrainian energy industry, stressing that here statistics were “not for the faint hearted.” The natural gas balance deficit for 2000 amounts to 17 billion cubic meters, a record. Fuel reserves in power stations are three times below standard. Instead of fuel oil they have to use gas. Industrial frequency is lowering for want of fuel. Four of Ukraine’s six oil refineries are at a standstill.
The Deputy Premier ended her sharply critical analysis of the power industry by making several reorganization proposals, adding that today “the technical link in the power industry chain is operating on its own, as is the money.” Ms. Tymoshenko believes that money has been pumped out of production via a network of “all kinds of wholesale markets” and trading houses. Law enforcement authorities have exposed 3,900 acts of theft in the power industry, including 476 cases of gross theft; corruption is the main reason for the power industry’s collapse.
Before the news conference, Ms. Tymoshenko suggested that the Prime Minister and president impose a three month emergency status on the power industry, while carrying out the “Pure Energy” program. She said both had been approved. She intends to destroy the “superstructures over the enterprises” and check the performance of privatized ones; if any of the latter were privatized contrary to law, they should be placed back under government control which she said is not so bad and not necessarily corrupt. Among other things, she wants the bazaar called the market replaced by a system of rigid price lists, thus stopping energy market dumping, and put an end to the practice of interenterprise settlements and money surrogates. To achieve this, she will ask law enforcement authorities to help.
Despite the program’s beautiful name [“Pure Energy”] and good rhetoric, many doubt the purity of intent on the part of the former head of the Unified Energy Systems of Ukraine. They expect eventually to hear an answer to the question, Precisely what debts are Ms. Tymoshenko going to deal with: those of the state or the company she once headed?
