Translated by Ollie Richardson

15:45:49
24/01/2018

vesti-ukr.com

In order for Kiev to receive a $1 billion loan from the US the White House set the condition to dismiss the Prosecutor General of Ukraine at the time.

[51:50 onwards]

This was stated on January 23rd in New York by the former Vice President of the United States Joseph Biden during a speech at the private American organisation “Council on Foreign Relations”, reports “Voice of America”.

“I am desperately concerned about the backsliding on the part of Kiev in terms of corruption. I’ll give you one concrete example. I was assigned Ukraine as a task. I remember how I convinced our team that we should be providing loan guarantees. I went to Kiev for the 12th or 13th time and I was supposed to announce that there was another $1 billion loan guarantee. And I got a commitment from Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the State Prosecutor, but they didn’t,” said Biden.

After this, he gave a press conference and said that the US won’t give the specified means to Ukraine.

“They said: ‘You have no authority, you aren’t the President, the President said…’. I said: ‘Call him’. I said: ‘I’m telling you, you aren’t getting the $1 billion’. I said: ‘I will be leaving here in about six hours – if the Prosecutor isn’t fired, then you aren’t getting the money’. Well, son of a bitch! He was fired! And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” noted the former Vice President of the United States.

Earlier the head of the mission of the IMF in Ukraine Ron van Rooden criticised the presidential bill of the Anti-corruption court. Van Rooden said that the adoption of the law in its current form will mean a violation of obligations by Ukraine.

In 2017, Ukraine in total was supposed to receive four tranches from the IMF within the framework of the EFF program. The then head of the National Bank of Ukraine Valeriya Gontaryeva at the time of January, 2017, didn’t have doubts. But as a result the IMF simply reduced the sum of the new tranche for Ukraine – to $1 billion, instead of $1.3 billion – and also was considerably late with payments.

The IMF considers that Ukraine will need their loan programs for 10-15 years. Earlier, the fund saw “considerable risks” in the budget of Ukraine for 2018 – both in income and expenditure.

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