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2.0 Politics
2.1 NBU says no IMF tranche for Ukraine this year
Ukraine will not receive its second scheduled International Monetary Fund (IMF) tranche of $700mn before the end of this year, governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) Kyrylo Shevchenko said following a week in Washington of meetings with the multilateral lender.
Ukraine’s cooperation with its key donor has been de facto suspended after the Constitution Court of Ukraine (CCU) cancelled key anti-corruption legislation on October 28, including a mandatory electronic income declaration and penalties for lying on the form effectively decriminalising corruption.
The decision quickly went from scandal to crisis and has left Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy scrambling to undo the damage. The president has called for the 15 judges – five of, which are already under investigation for corruption – to be sacked and for the anti-corruption laws to be replaced. However, as neither the president nor the parliament have the power to sack or appoint judges on the CCU the whole affair threatens to blow up into a constitution crisis.
There has been a temporary respite after several of the judges said they were suspending their work due to the scandal, which has effectively closed the court down for the meantime, but the IMF is unlikely to restart its $5bn Stand by agreement (SBA) programme, of, which Ukraine has already received $2.1bn in June, until the affair is settled and the anti-corruption laws are back in place.
Shevchenko travelled to Washington to meet and IMF this week and made an
6 UKRAINE Country Report December 2020 www.intellinews.com
