Yushchenko And Tymoshenko Back At It

MOSCOW, Russia -- The short-lived friendship between Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is over.

The Ukrainian president (L) has cast doubt on Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's greatest accomplishment, the repayment of Soviet bank debts.
Thursday, Yushchenko, speaking at a session of his secretariat, blamed Tymoshenko's government for the country's rampant inflation, which he said is the worst in the last eight years.

He named the repayment of the debts of the Savings Bank (Sberbank) of the USSR as the cause of January's 2.9-percent inflation, thus casting aspersion on Tymoshenko's greatest accomplishment in office.

Yushchenko also interfered with Tymoshenko's control over the State Property Fund, the main instrument of privatization in the country.

A bill has been introduced into the Supreme Rada to dismiss current head of the fund Valentina Semenyuk and three of her deputies and replace her with Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc member Andrey Portnov.

That bill has been stalled, along with all others on the Rada's agenda, by the Party of the Regions blockage of legislative activity while it demands a referendum of Ukraine's entry into NATO.

The government circumvented the Rada to dismiss Semenyuk and appoint Portnov the fund's acting head, but that move met with a firestorm of criticism in the presidential secretariat for being un-constitutional.

Thursday, Yushchenko signed an order reversing Semenyuk's dismissal.

Portnov, a proponent of reprivatization, intended to reconsider several privatization deals, a process needed by Tymoshenko to shore up the sagging federal budget and to signify the triumph of her populist social policies.

Source: Kommersant