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Volodymyr Zelensky declared more than 28 million UAH (€935,000) of income in the past year — the president "let go of his businesses but his earnings doubled thanks to royalties and property" (Kyiv Post); Petro Poroshenko earned 773 million UAH (around €25m) in 2019, the majority coming from dividends (Ukrainska Pravda); and “Opposition Platform” deputy Viktor Medvedchuk declared his possession of a fragment from one of the few dozen surviving copies of Gutenberg’s Bible, but refused to say how much he paid for it (Ukrainska Pravda).
This coincided with the return of the Forbes Ukraine magazine, which recently published its first issue since 2017 and featured a ranking of Ukraine’s wealthiest men (The Babel):
Rinat Akhmetov ($2.8 billion)
Viktor Pinchuk ($1.4 billion)
Petro Poroshenko ($1.4 billion) Oleksandr & Halyna Hereha ($1.3 billion) Hennady Boholyubov ($1.2 billion)
Estimating wealth is a notoriously difficult endeavor, even more so in a business environment as murky as Ukraine’s, and those figures should be taken with a big grain of salt: just seven months ago, respected Ukrainian weekly NV put out its own ranking of Ukraine’s wealthiest, and estimated Akhmetov’s fortune at $9.6 billion, a whopping $7 billion difference! Bloomberg provides a third opinion, estimating the metallurgy baron’s wealth at $5.10 billion.
Supporters of Petro Poroshenko also accused Forbes of overestimating his fortune in order to discredit him, as the former president hadn’t been on most billionaires lists since 2015. Here however, Forbes and NV’s assessments match pretty closely.
2.5 IMF warns Ukraine may not recover from virus slump until 2024.
Ukraine’s recovery from its coronavirus- induced slump may take four years, the International Monetary Fund warned, after approving $5bn of aid for the eastern European nation this week.
“Under the baseline, the pace of economic growth is projected to pick up only gradually in the years ahead, to around 4%, as some further progress is made in implementing structural reforms,” the IMF said Thursday. “Output isn’t expected to reach its pre-crisis levels until 2023–24.” The Washington-based lender cited enduring risks from Covid-19, the government’s limited fiscal space and weak consumer demand in predicting a 1.1% rebound in gross domestic product in 2021 after a projected 8.2% contraction this year.
That’s despite the IMF financing, which will support rescue efforts via the budget and, which unlocks an additional $1bn from the World Bank and 1.2bn euros ($1.4bn) from the European Union.
Highlighting the deeper than expected recession and its aftermath, the central bank slashed interest rates Thursday by 2 percentage points to their lowest level since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
10 UKRAINE Country Report July 2020 www.intellinews.com
