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The Regions This Week
March 31, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 6
Eastern Europe
There was intense foreign media coverage of the arrest in Moscow of anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny during weekend marches in 87 Russian regional cities, but the response of state media was muted or non-existent. The Russian leadership was dismissive about the country’s biggest rallies in five years. “In essence what we saw in several places, especially in Moscow – it was provocation and lies,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on March 27.
The High Court in London ruled it would not
be right for a $3bn Eurobond case brought by Russia against Ukraine to go to full trial since Kyiv has no “justifiable defence” for its failure to redeem the notes in December 2015. Ukraine had still sought a full trial on the grounds that Rus- sia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 had economically impaired its ability to pay debts.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko instruct- ed the army to cease fire in Donbas starting from April 1, although he has no “great opti- mism” regarding the compliance of pro-Russian rebels and Moscow. The move followed an agree- ment secured by the trilateral OSCE-Ukraine- Russia contact group on March 29 to impose the ceasefire in Donbas from April 1 and to disengage forces near Stanytsia Luhanska from April 6.
The executive board of the International Mon- etary Fund (IMF) will on April 3 consider the allocation of the next $1bn tranche to Ukraine from the multinational lender’s $17.5bn credit programme, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshen- ko said during a visit to Malta on March 30.
Poland temporarily shut down its six consulates in Ukraine until the security situation improves. The move is a reaction to an attack on the Pol- ish consulate in Lutsk earlier in the week. Poland suggests it suspects the attack may have been a provocation inspired by Russia, and has demand- ed the Ukrainian authorities boost security for its diplomatic posts.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman demanded the resignation of officials at the Na- tional Agency for Corruption Prevention (NACP) responsible for creation and maintenance of the electronic declarations system of Ukrainian of- ficials, after the system crashed for several days. The introduction last autumn of the system state officials must use to declare income and assets was a key condition of the IMF.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), the country’s main anti-graft agency, raided the headquarters of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) as part of a criminal investigation into abuse of power by senior central bank offi- cials in 2015-2016.
The United States Agency for International De- velopment (USAID) has suspended cooperation with Ukraine’s National Agency for Prevention of Corruption (NAPC), after Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on March 27 signed a contro- versial law restricting the operations of NGOs that receive foreign money. The law is very similar to a highly criticized Russian law.
The National Bank of Belarus will reduce its benchmark interest rate by 1pp to 14% on April 19. The interest rate on standing and bilateral operations designed to keep up the current liquid- ity of Belarusian banks will be reduced from 18% to 17% per annum, while the rates on standing liquidity absorption transactions - from 10% to 9% per annum.
Russia’s largest gold miner Polyus Gold will hold a secondary public offering (SPO) by the end of spring 2017. In late January, Polyus was report- edly considering an SPO with one or more anchor investors. Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Sber- bank CIB and VTB Capital are possible underwrit- ers of the SPO, Interfax reported, cited unnamed sources.