The meeting of the Verkhovna Rada was arranged for the evening of March 2. The draft laws of the Cabinet of Ministers mainly focused on filling the country’s budget, which already comes unglued, appeared on the agenda. But the deputies failed to start in time: the colleagues of Oleg Lyashko in the Radical Party blocked the rostrum demanding to dismiss the head of the NBU Valeriya Gontareva. It took the speaker a lot of efforts to settle the situation and start the meeting, where, in addition, the members of the Ukrainian government came to. The deputies promised to work to the successful end.
The cornerstone of the meeting was the budget of 2015. The people’s deputies generally supported with 273 votes the government draft law No2147 “On amendments to the Law of Ukraine “On the State Budget of Ukraine for 2015.” Thus, the state budget income flow was increased by 4.6% (or by 22, 093, 419,6 UAH) – up to 498, 032, 668,3 UAH. Expenses increased by 6.6% (or by 35, 229, 011,9 UAH) – up to 563, 122, 662,9 UAH. The law also provides the increase in public borrowings by 103,6 billion UAH or by 35,3% compared to approved index mainly due to foreign borrowings. Moreover, the deputies allowed the Ministry of Finance to restructure the external public debt.
And then the people’s deputies began to seek funds to fill the budget. However, they didn’t have to do that by themselves since the Cabinet of Ministers has already prepared its portfolio of measures. The first blow found the gas producing companies with a high percentage of state ownership. As a result of the approval of the relevant amendments to the Tax Code by the Verkhovna Rada, the rates of royalties for natural gas from gas pools up to 5 thousand meters were increased from 20% to 70% from the cost of the commercial products of a mining company.
Then the members of parliament reduced the amount of support for Naftogaz of Ukraine by 29.7 billion UAH.
“The adoption and implementation of the draft law will allow to attract about 9 billion UAH into the state budget of Ukraine in 2015,” the explanatory memorandum to the document said.
The second source of the budget replenishment or, rather, the reduction of its expense side was the introduction of modifications to pension legislation. However, this law was adopted generally by 238 votes only at the fifth attempt.
The laws provides the gradual increase in preferential retirement age for women by 5 years and also increase of a pension qualifying period (and a special qualifying period in some occupations) by 5 years for those, who are eligible for retirement in enterprises with harmful working conditions and for long-service pensions starting from March 1, 2015. Working pensioners will be paid pensions in the amount of 85% but not less than the minimum living wage (1423 UAH for today). Pensions granted in accordance with current legislation won’t be paid for persons in the period of work on positions that provide special pensions (people’s deputies, state officials, judges, prosecutors). The government promised to prepare the draft law on abolition of special pensions by June 1. If such a document is not prepared, special pensions will be abolished automatically.
As the Minister of Social Policy Pavel Rozenko said, at the same time the law doesn’t restrict the pensions for disabled persons of groups I, II and III, participants in military operations including the ATO participants, family members of perished ATO participants. Provisions of the law won’t touch women with many children.
Taking into account the difficult financial situation in the country, the people’s deputies agreed to reduce the amount of funds that the NBU should transfer to the budget in 2015 to 60,5 billion UAH (by 7,5%).
The deputies also took care of energy issues by allowing the Cabinet of Ministers to raise sovereign credit funds to create an emergency reserve energy fund of up to $1 billion (the Law No.2147).
While considering the expenses, the parliamentarians agreed to provide 12.5 billion UAH for subsidies for financially disadvantaged citizens (the Law No.2147), it is planned to provide 3 billion UAH to help temporarily displaced persons and another 300 million UAH will be allocated for housing construction for the ATO participants.
Generally speaking, they worked fruitfully and went to have a rest with satisfaction because tomorrow they will come back in action.
