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Rada to hold emergency session Monday
Journal Staff Report

KYIV, April 8 – Parliament will hold an emergency session on Monday, three days later than planned, to debate and vote on legislation required for Ukraine to win lending from the International Monetary Fund.

"The emergency session will be a bit delayed in time,” Parliamentary Speaker Dmytro Razumkov said Wednesday. “It will probably take place on Monday."

Lawmakers previously said the session would take place Friday, as Ukraine seeks as soon as possible to approve the legislation to qualify for up to $9.5 billion in lending from the IMF to stabilize its economy hit by coronavirus.

The delay comes as a group of lawmakers thought to be linked to powerful tycoon, billionaire Ihor Kolomoyskiy, submitted more than 16,000 amendments in the past five days to a banking bill, one of the key pieces of legislation demanded by the IMF.

The effort is widely seen as an attempt to delay the bill and perhaps to undermine Ukraine’s cooperation with the IMF as scraping the bill would likely help the tycoon to dramatically expand his business interests in the country.

Oleksiy Honcharuk, a reformist former prime minister who was dismissed by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy last month, said the attempt to flood the bill with amendments was a “political terrorism” and “blackmail” that threatens the national security.

"Political terrorism is exactly the kind of analogy that comes to mind when you begin to analyze the situation surrounding the consideration of the banking bill,” Honcharuk tweeted on Wednesday, urging lawmakers to push forward with the bill. “There is no negotiation with terrorists.”

“The aim of the puppeteers behind the 16,381 amendments is to make [the government] negotiate with them under a threat of default,” Honcharuk said. “This is an ordinary blackmail, and parliament is a political hostage. This is a threat to the national security.”

The bill, which was approved in the first reading on March 30, seeks to prevent the former owners of banks that were nationalized or liquidated in recent years from regaining ownership rights or receiving monetary compensation.

Kolomoyskiy was persistently seeking to regain ownership of PrivatBank, but the bill would have prevented him from regaining the ownership. The IMF supports the bill as a way of preventing corruption in the country.

Kolomoyskiy on Tuesday denied speculations that he is behind the amendments, but he had quickly attacked the bill as “anti-Ukrainian.”

“It’s trading sovereignty and the Constitution for 30 pieces of silver,” Kolomoyskiy said. (tl/ez)




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