The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) will reduce the refinancing rate to 17.5% from 18% from April 26, 2019, NBU Governor Yakiv Smolii has said at a briefing.
“The board of the National Bank decided to lower the refinancing rate to 17.5% per annum from April 26. Currently, a steady downward trend in inflation towards the 5% target allows the National Bank to begin the cycle of reducing the refinancing rate,” he said.
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius, who arrived in Kyiv on a visit, met with President-elect of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky. “Held very good meeting with Ukraine’s President-elect V. Zelensky in Kyiv: congratulated on his land sliding victory in Presidential elections, reaffirmed Lithuania’s continuous steadfast support to Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, reforms, European & Euro-Atlantic integration,” he wrote on Twitter. He also published a joint photo with Zelensky in the social network.
As reported, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania Linas Linkevicius is on a working visit to Ukraine on April 25-26. The purpose of his visit to Kyiv is to deepen bilateral cooperation in the framework of the Ukrainian-Lithuanian strategic partnership.
The American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine is concerned about the introduction of the PSA (product sharing agreements) mechanism in addition to the license/royalty regime which continues to run in parallel.
The Chamber said that the criteria discriminating PSA and other blocks are unclear. The current PSA process is seriously flawed.
“PSAs are not used in any EU country, and their use in Ukraine only underlines the urgent need for reforms in the existing oil and gas fiscal and regulatory regime,” the Chamber said, adding that a single, fair, stable and non-discriminatory environment for oil and gas is one of the key factors in attracting major international investment.
The American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine looks forward to working with the government and members of the international community to offer ways to address shortcomings in the current PSA process and to create an environment that sparks a resurgence of interest in the sector and allows Ukraine to achieve its objectives including self-sufficiency in gas.
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Ukraine in January-February 2019 acquired nuclear fuel for a total of $45.155 million.
According to the State Statistics Service, in the two months of the current year, Russian-made fuel was purchased for Ukrainian nuclear power plants for $17.437 million, fuel from Sweden for $27.719 million.
Thus, the share of purchases of nuclear fuel by Ukraine for the reporting period from TVEL (Russia) in monetary terms was 38.6%, from Westinghouse (Sweden) some 61.4%.
The operator of all four NPPs in Ukraine is state-owned enterprise Energoatom, which purchases nuclear fuel under the contracts with TVEL and Westinghouse Electric Sweden.
