Page 6 - BNE_magazine_12_2019 dec19

6 I The Month That Was bne December 2019
Politics
Eastern Europe
Officials from Russia, Ukraine and the EU met again on October 28
in Brussels to discuss terms for the transit of Russian gas via Ukraine next year, with still no breakthrough in negotiations in sight.
Germany’s Bundestag parliament
has failed to pass a bill that would have helped shield the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project from recent amendments to the EU’s gas directive. The amendments, approved
in April, impose EU rules on third-party access, ownership unbundling, non- discriminatory tariffs and transparency on pipelines entering the bloc from third countries, potentially preventing Nord Stream 2 from operating at its full 55bn cubic metre per year capacity.
The Moscow municipal court denied bail to US citizen Michael Calvey, ruling at a hearing on October 29 that he must remain under house arrest before a trial where he faces charges of embezzlement and fraud. Calvey and five other top executives of Russia’s leading private equity firm Baring Vostok were arrested on St Valentine’s day this year on charges they claim
were manufactured by their former fellow investor into the Vostochniy bank.
provided with the aim to stabilise the nation's VAB Bank, which was declared insolvent in November 2014.
The total debt of Ukraine's insolvent VAB Bank and bank Financial Initiative owned by oligarch Oleh Bakhmatyuk to the state is UAH29.3bn ($1.2bn), according to the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU). The banks owe UAH11bn to the Deposit Guarantee Fund, UAH10.6bn debt to the NBU and UAH7.7bn to three state-run banks.
Central Europe
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party backtracked on its idea to hike social insurance contributions for top earners after one of its coalition partners pledged to vote it down. PiS wanted to do away with the rule that freezes deductions of contributions to the social insurance fund ZUS from
an employee’s gross salary once the salary becomes bigger than 30 times the national average annually.
Tens of thousands of neo-nazis and far right supporters marched through downtown Warsaw on November 11 in the 10th Independence March, an annual event that has gained notoriety because it is organised by far-right parties and groups seen as gaining strength in Poland.
Southeast Europe
Serbia’s President Aleksandar
Vucic said on November 21 that the country’s intelligence services have revealed a large-scale intelligence operation, carried out by Russian spies and Serbian military officers. This
spy scandal was surprising considering Serbia’s very friendly relations with Russia. Vucic said in his statement he was certain that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin was not involved.
More than 120 journalists are
still being held in Turkey’s jails,
a global record, and the situation
of the media in the country has not improved since the lifting of a two-year state of emergency last year, a new report released on November 19 by global press watchdog International Press Institute (IPI) has concluded.
Turkish police continued the Erdogan administration’s purging of pro- Kurdish mayors, with four detained over suspected links to Kurdish rebels. In all, some 20 pro-Kurdish mayors have been removed from office and replaced with government appointees in the past eight months, with 14 of them jailed.
Eurasia
A Kyrgyzstan-linked businessman shot dead in Turkey in mid-November had secretly provided reporters
with evidence of corruption in Kyrgyzstan’s customs service along
with information on massive outflows of cash from the country, according to
a new joint investigation by RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Kyrgyz news site Kloop.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), the country's main anti- graft agency, has detained former deputy governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) Oleksandr Pysaruk among seven people who have been accused of embezzling UAH1.2bn ($49mn) that was part of a NBU loan
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