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Eastern Europe
March 9, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 19
president's rating remains stable, according to VTsIOM.
The biggest winner from Putin’s falling rating has been Pavel Grudinin, candidate of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, who has seen his ratings grow to about 8%.
However, Grudinin ran into problems this week after it came out that he has bank accounts in Switzerland that he did not declare. Russia’s
Naftogaz’s fragile success
Central Election Committee is currently investigating but may remove his name from the ballot. That would be a big problem for the Kremlin, which is struggling to make the elections interesting enough so voters will actually turn out to vote. While there is little doubt of Putin’s victory, a low turnout will undermine his legitimacy and only fuel more protests. Last year regional and municipal elections were marred by historically low turnouts.
Fabrice Deprez in Kyiv
Reforming Ukraine’s state-owned gas company is like doing surgery, Yuri Vitrenko argues.
The commercial director of Naftogaz has a thing for medical analogies, comparing the company to a human body and saying his goal is to turn it into a “healthy, fit person”. But he’s also careful not to oversell the company’s achievements in the last three years: “We’ve stopped the bleeding, we’re out of emergency care, but there still is a lot of rehabilitation to do” he tells bne IntelliNews in an exclusive interview in Kyiv.
Naftogaz found itself in the middle of yet
another gas war with the Russian gas
monopolist Gazpromon March 2. Naftogaz has just won a years-long arbitration decision in Stockholm and the Russian gas giant is supposed
Yuri Vitrenko, Naftogaz commercial director.
to pay $2.56bn in compensation for overcharging for gas and underpaying for gas transit through Ukraine to its Western customers. Gazprom looks like it will refuse to pay and threatened to break its supply and transit agreement with Ukraine the next day.
Dealing with an irate Russia is part of the company’s brief and catches the headlines,
but more importantly for Ukraine has been
the revolutionary change at the company. Gas subsides used to account for 8% of GDP and the company’s debt weighed heavily on the budget. But at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) insistence, the company has been through a dramatic transformation: tariffs have been hiked and today the $3.8bn Naftogaz paid to the state budget in the form of taxes and dividends makes