Ukraine votes to sack government over gas deal [FT]
By Tom Warner in Kiev and FT reporters
Published: January 10 2006 14:26 | Last updated: January 10 2006 15:57
The Ukrainian parliament on Tuesday voted to oust Prime Minister Yuri Yekhanurov’s government over last week’s gas deal with Russia which in effect doubled the price of gas to the country.
A no-confidence motion was backed by 250 deputies in the 450-seat parliament, outraged by the deal with Russia.
Mr Yekhanurov claimed the vote was not legally binding and vowed to continue in office until parliamentary elections, due in March. Analysts disagreed whether parliament had the power to dismiss the cabinet.
Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister of Ukraine and once a close ally of President Viktor Yushchenko, backed opposition efforts to sack officials who agreed to the sharp rise in gas prices.
Her faction in parliament supported the no-confidence vote overwhelmingly, as did the Communist Party and the Popular Bloc, the party of parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, also formerly one of the president’s allies. Almost half the deputies of Mr Yushchenko’s party Our Ukraine chose not to vote.
Ms Tymoshenko has made every effort to harness opposition to last week’s gas agreement with the intention of weakening Mr Yushchenko’s party before the elections.
Under the deal, Kiev will pay $95 per 1,000 cubic metres for a mixture of Russian and Turkmen gas, compared with $50 it was paying for Russian gas.
Mr Yushchenko and Mr Yekhanurov described the gas deal as a victory of Ukrainian diplomacy that ended a crisis in which Russia sharply reduced gas supplies into the pipeline system that supplies Ukraine and many European countries, leading to shortages across the continent for several hours on January 2.
However, Ms Tymoshenko and others have criticised Mr Yekhanurov’s government for agreeing to fix the rate charged to Russia for transit of its gas to Europe for five years while Ukraine received only a six-month guarantee on its gas import prices.
Industrial groups allied to opposition parties have also criticised the deal. On Monday they were joined by the Industrial Union of the Donbass, which imports gas independently from Uzbekistan and had been allied to Mr Yushchenko |
