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Eastern Europe
May 25, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 16
Roman Abramovich. The investment bank issued a very similar press release explaining its decision to remove Kraus, a well known commentator. However, the bank forgot to remove the reply-to email address in the mail out which showed the original text was written by Sibneft’s PR team.
Ukraine experts see growing threat of default, hryvnia devaluation as elections approach
bne IntelliNews
Ukrainian experts see a growing threat of default on Ukraine’s sovereign obligations and a devaluation of the domestic currency, ahead of the approaching presidential and parliamentary elections, according to a reports published by Kyiv-based think-tank VoxUkraine and the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) on May 22.
The current $17.5bn support programme agreed between Kyiv and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expires in March 2019, just before Ukraine enters elections’ long cycle: presidential elections in March next year and parliamentary elections in October.
"But Ukraine’s authorities don’t have time until March next year as heavy payments start soon," the document reads. "Indeed, Ukraine faces more than $10bn of external public debt repayments in 2018 and 2019, including principal and interest on external debt. Repayments to official creditors, such as the IMF, the World Bank or the US, account for almost two-thirds of this amount."
Though the Ukrainian authorities had enough
Everything in Fak’s report is public knowledge and in theory his report should not have been controversial, but state-owned Russian companies remain allergic to open criticism and use their considerable clout to quash criticism, even if that hurts their image more than the actual report in question.
resources to make repayments in the first quarter of 2018, external sovereign debt coming due until end-2019 amounts to sizable $8.5bn, accounting for almost half of central bank’s international reserves.
According to official data, Ukraine's foreign exchange reserves rose by $229mn, or 1.3% month-on-month to $18.421bn in April.
Without new foreign currency borrowings, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) reserves will slid below commonly recognised safety threshold of three months of imports already by the end of 2018, according to the document.
"Continuous decline in reserves coupled with increased uncertainty on the eve of elections and unfavourable end-year foreign exchange market seasonality will likely give a rise to devaluation expectations," the authors, among which one of the most prominent Ukrainian economists, wrote.
"Pressures on the national currency will build up quickly, putting hryvnia at risk of sharp