This week wasn’t among the Ukrainian parliament’s most productive ones, but at least the start of it was spectacular: Lawmaker Yuriy Boyko of the Opposition Bloc punched Oleh Lyashko of the Radical Party during the meeting of heads of parliament’s factions on Nov. 14.
Besides that, lawmakers voted to compensate money lost of people who invested money into unsafe funds, they supported a State Road Fund and agreed to fund a Crimean Tatar TV station, failed to ratify a Council of Europe convention and refused to strip an oligarch lawmaker of legal immunity.
Compensations for depositors of Bank Mykhailivsky
Parliament voted on Nov. 15 to alter the law on deposits insurance. Now, Ukraine’s Deposit Guarantee Fund will begin insuring the money deposited in the non-bank financial institutions.
The vote came in after months of protests of defrauded depositors, most of them being former clients of Bank Mykhailivsky. The bank attracted depositors with high annual growth rates. But the money wasn’t deposited in the insured bank accounts. Instead, it went to the non-insured funds associated with the bank. When the bank collapsed in May, more than 14,000 depositors together lost Hr 1.5 billion, or $55 million.
Now they will get compensation from the Deposit Guarantee Fund. It insures up to Hr 200,000 ($7,600) of a given deposit.
The bill was suggested by President Petro Poroshenko. He signed it into the law after the Rada’s vote on Nov. 16.
Vadim Novinsky remains untouchable
Earlier in November, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko asked the parliament to lift the legal immunity of Vadim Novinsky, an oligarch lawmaker with Opposition Bloc.
Read: “Vadim Novinsky: Ukraine’s ‘Russian’ Oligarch”
Prosecutors suspect Novinsky of participating in a plot, along with several other loyalists of former President Viktor Yanukovych, to oust the late Metropolitan Volodymyr (Sabodan), the former leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate and replace him with a more loyal church leader in 2013.
But on Nov. 17 the parliament’s procedural committee refused to put the issue up for voting, saying they would need evidence of Novinsky’s wrongdoing. Lutsenko said the law banned him from providing it, meaning that Novinsky retains his immunity from prosecution.
Parliament against Istanbul Convention
Ukraine’s parliament refused to ratify a Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, also known as Istanbul Convention on Nov. 17.
The lawmakers were concerned about the parts of the convention that mention gender identification and sexual orientation.
The text of the convention says that the victims’ rights should be protected without discrimination on any ground, including, among other things, sexual orientation and gender identity.
Lawmakers from the Radical Party and Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc said that certain parts of the conventions “are unacceptable from the point of view of Christian morality.”
After a heated discussion, the lawmakers voted to send the ratification bill back to the parliament’s committees for removing the gender identity and sexual orientation from the anti-discrimination list.
State Road Fund set up
The Rada made a crucial step towards better roads in Ukraine: On Nov. 17, the lawmakers passed two bills that set up the State Road Fund of Ukraine.
This new body, that has been in the talks for a long time, will change the way the road building and repairs are financed.
Now, the money for the road repairs is allocated from the state budget, meaning that the payments depend on whether the budget can afford it.
But under the new law, the fund will be collecting all road-related fees, including the gas excise duty, and spend it on the road repairs only.
It will allow doubling the funding of the roads. While the budget allocated Hr 31 billion for the roads in 2016, Infrastructure Ministry expects to get twice more in 2017 through the new State Road Fund.
Funding for Crimean TV station in exile
The parliament voted to amend the Budget Codex and allocate funding to the TV stations that used to function in Crimea but had to relocate to mainland Ukraine after Russia annexed the peninsula in March 2014.
While the law allows giving state funding to all TV stations that moved from Crimea, it is designed to save ATR – Ukraine’s only Crimean Tatar TV station.
A privately-owned TV station, ATR was launched in Crimea in 2006, and had to close in March of 2015 under pressure from the Russian authorities that took over the peninsula. It started broadcasting from Kyiv in June of 2015. Lately, the TV station has been having financial difficulties.
Poroshenko vetoes movie business rebates
Poroshenko vetoed the new bill on state support for cinematography on Nov. 18 and returned it to the parliament for more work.
The law, passed on Sept. 22, was designed to make Ukraine a more attractive shooting location for foreign filmmakers through a system of rebates.
It gave foreign and Ukrainian film producers rebates of 25 percent of the production costs of movies shot in Ukraine, as well as 10 percent of the sum spent on wages to Ukrainian film crew members.
Poroshenko returned the bill to the parliament, suggesting that the mechanism of the rebate issuing should be improved. The president’s press service doesn’t specify what Poroshenko wants to change exactly.
Kyiv Post staff writers Josh Kovensky and Veronika Melkozerova contributed to this story.
