Translated by Ollie Richardson & Angelina Siard

19:25:05
03/10/2017

strana.ua

The Rada accepted the pension reform, with 288 People’s Deputies voting “for” it. The correspondent of “Strana” reported about it from the place of events.

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Before the acceptance of the pension reform in the sessional hall the Prime Minister Vladimir Groisman gave a speech, in which he urged parliamentarians to vote for a “historical decision”.

As “Strana” reported, both factions of the government demanded to accept the pension reform as soon as possible. However, many amendments were made to the draft – more than 2,000 were submitted.

“In fact there are a lot of amendments to the pension reform, and they have already been fulfilled by the Ministry of Social Policy. The Minister (Andrey Reva) will report on it. As he says, no less than half of the edits from the specified number were already removed or considered. If this is so, then consideration of the bill is only a matter of of one plenary day, and it can be even quicker. The ideal scenario: tomorrow we want to accept both the judicial and pension reform,” predicted the deputy from Bloc of Petro Poroshenko Aleksey Goncharenko [presumably before the vote – ed].

It should be noted that the pension reform is one of the unpopular decisions of the government bloc. It was criticised by the IMF and the World bank. Discontent was caused by the amendment providing the beginning of the indexation of pensions according to a new formula only as of 2022. In the initial version it said 2019.

Thus, users of social networks reacted with humour to the statement of the Vice-Prime Minister of Ukraine, who said that pensions will be increased by as much as 79 hryvnias in comparison with the earlier planned increase.

He wrote about this on his Facebook: “Today at a meeting with People’s Deputies of Ukraine and heads of factions to discuss pension reform, another important decision was made about the fact that we are ready, and for this purpose we have the resources so that from October 1st the minimum size of pensions grows not to 1373 hryvnias, as was planned earlier, but so that the minimum size of pensions grows to 1452 hryvnias”.

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