Last Thursday Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada rejected the cabinet-drafted state budget for 2006, with 274 MPs voting for this resolution. Parliament ruled that the state budget bill that the cabinet had drafted for a second reading runs counter to the budget-related resolution passed on Nov. 1, 2005. The cabinet must revise the draft budget, taking into account parliament’s “budget-related conclusions” (to increase estimated expenditures of local budgets’ general fund by UAH 5 billion in 2006, etc.), and submit the revised version to parliament for another reading in one week’s time.
Parliament also failed to pass a resolution on Prime Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov’s report on the problems connected to Ukraine’s socioeconomic development in the current year and future outlooks in 2006. Nor did the MPs take a vote of no-confidence in the cabinet, as was expected earlier. The parliamentarians were offered two draft resolutions on Yekhanurov’s report, but neither of them got the required number of votes, Interfax-Ukraine reports.
As this matter was being discussed, Petro Tsybenko (Communist Party faction) proposed that cabinet’s performance be assessed as unsatisfactory, but his proposal was not put to a vote. “We will continue to demand that the government be given an unsatisfactory mark. The government deserves this today,” Tsybenko said. The cabinet also took a great deal of flak from Andriy Shkil (BYuT faction), who laid great emphasis on the fact that the Cabinet of Ministers has made no effort to implement court rulings concerning the Nikopol Ferroalloy Works. “The BYuT categorically opposes the prime minister being on his party election list. He must either resign or go on vacation,” Shkil said. Nestor Shufrych (SDPU(O) faction) reminded the MPs that the Social Democrats had not voted to appoint Yekhanurov as prime minister because they knew that President Yushchenko would not allow him to control the cabinet members effectively. He cited the case of Oleksiy Ivchenko, head of Naftohaz Ukrainy. “Ivchenko has put Ukraine’s economy on the brink of collapse,” Shufrych said, noting that the company chairman deadlocked the talks on Russian gas supplies to Ukraine. In the end, Verkhovna Rada Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn issued instructions to modify the draft resolution on Yekhanurov’s report.
