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The Regions This Week
May 31, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 5
Eastern Europe
Russia's Yandex.Taxi taxi aggregator is in early talks to add a helicopter transportation option to its application, Kommersant daily reported citing unnamed sources close to negotiations between the company, the Moscow authorities, and Russian Helicopters, a subsidiary of state tech agency Rostec.
She has already been Ukraine’s prime minister twice and now opposition firebrand Yulia Ty- moshenko is seeking the office for a third time. Tymoshenko urged Ukrainians to vote for her Fatherland party in the July 21 early parliamen- tary elections so that she can return as prime minister. "If people vote for our party, truly, I as a leader can compete for the prime minister post," she told Ukrainian state radio.
A dispute over how much contaminated oil is
in Russia’s Druzhba oil pipeline is likely to sty- mie the restart of deliveries of crude via the pipeline to customers in the west. The country's state pipeline Transneft operator has disputed the quantity of contaminated oil that was supplied to Europe via Belarus. About 3mn tonnes of oil were contaminated with organic chloride, not the 5mn estimated by Belarus, the VP of the company Sergei Andronov told Kommersant daily.
Ukraine’s relations with the IMF remain on track and will continue after the parliamentary elections, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on May 28. Inves- tors were slightly spooked after Ukrainian oligarch and the president’s sponsor Ihor Kolomoisky sug- gested Ukraine should default on its IMF debt.
Russian consumers remained under pressure
in April, according to Rosstat’s monthly report. Retail sales is the best indicator of consumer con- fidence and fell again slightly from the previous
month, dropping to 1.2% y/y versus 1.6%), a trend seen for the last five consecutive months.
Russia's industrial output growth in April 2019 jumped to 4.9% y/y after 1.2% growth in March, according to the latest data by Rosstat statistics agency. The notable increase in industrial output comes as a surprise, as consensus expectations of economists surveyed by Reuters stood at 1.5%.
The People’s Servant party, led by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, will aim to form the parliamentary majority by itself in the early elections scheduled for July 21, campaign manag- er Oleksandr Korniyenko told a press conference.
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a pack- age of laws and decrees that prolong the ongo- ing capital amnesty and repatriation drive from June 1, 2019 to February 29, 2020, Vedomosti daily said citing the state legal information portal.
According to the St Petersburg anti-monopoly service, organised chains accounted for 91% of the food retail market in Russia’s second city St Petersburg in 2018. The leader was X5 Retail Group with 27%, followed by Lenta with 13.7%, and O’Key with 11%.
The EU is dangling a €500mn long-term loan before Ukraine — contingent on the Zelenskiy government implementing key anti-corruption steps. Christian Danielsson, the EU’s director general for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement, told reporters in Kyiv.
The EBRD joined several of Ukraine's international partners in their call to postpone the implementa- tion of a new model of the wholesale electricity market, which is supposed to be launched on July 1.