The European Investment Bank will provide Ukraine with EUR 50 million for vaccination against COVID-19, Deputy Health Minister Ihor Ivaschenko said during a press briefing in Kyiv on Monday.
“Last week, the Cabinet of Ministers approved a president’s order authorizing Health Minister Maksym Stepanov to sign a letter amending the financial agreement between Ukraine and the EIB,” he said.
“The government has asked the EIB to redistribute part of the funds and channel them to the vaccination of the population in Ukraine. The Cabinet of Ministers has received confirmation of the provision of EUR 50 million, which will be used for the purchase of vaccines, equipment for the refrigerating chain, as well as logistics. Relevant amendments to the agreement will be signed in the near future,” the deputy minister said.
Polish Getin Holding S.A. (Wroclaw) on February 5 signed an agreement with a Ukrainian buyer for the sale of 100% of the shares of subsidiary Idea Bank (Lviv) and 100% of the shares of New Finance Service (Kyiv), Getin Holding S.A. has said.
According to a report on biznes.pap.pl, the parties plan to close the potential deal by September 30, 2021.
Before that the buyer will conduct due diligence the companies, and after a positive result of the due diligence the parties will proceed to agree on the terms of the potential transaction.
Getin Holding also reports that the company granted the buyer exclusive rights for negotiations until April 30, 2021.
Idea Bank (formerly Plus Bank) was founded in 1989. As of January 1, 2020, its sole shareholder was the financial group Getin Holding S.A. (Poland).
According to the National Bank of Ukraine, as of October 1, 2020, Idea Bank ranked 24th among 74 operating banks in terms of total assets (UAH 8.057 billion).
The National Guard of Ukraine will receive ten H225 helicopters in 2021-2022 under the contract with Airbus Helicopters, the Interior Ministry said.
In accordance with the agreement between the Ukrainian and French governments, Airbus Helicopters and the state-owned enterprise Ukrainian Aviation and Transport Enterprise Khoryv Avia signed a contract for the supply of 12 H225 helicopters for the needs of the National Guard in 2018-2022, according to a report on Telegram channel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
At the official meeting, representatives of the National Guard of Ukraine and Airbus Helicopters considered the issue of supplying six aircraft in 2021 and sending two helicopters available at National Guard to Airbus Helicopters enterprises. This decision was made in order to carry out modernization in a bid to upgrade the helicopters that were previously transferred.
In 2018-2019, Airbus Helicopters supplied two helicopters. In addition, representatives of the company retrained two crews of the National Guard and part of the engineering and technical staff (in France, Scotland and Germany to ensure the maintenance and operation of these helicopters), the Ministry of Internal Affairs said.
Ukraine’s international reserves as of February 1, 2021, according to preliminary data, fell to $28.821 billion (equivalent), which is $279 million less than at the beginning of January this year, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has said.
“In January, they [the reserves] decreased by 1.1%, primarily due to the repayment of external and internal obligations of the state. At the same time, the intervention of the National Bank in the foreign exchange market and foreign exchange receipts in favor of the government partially counterbalanced the impact of payments for servicing the state debt,” the report says.
The Supreme Court has sided the cassation appeal of Tedis Ukraine against the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine and invalidated the earlier decision of the committee to impose a fine of UAH 3.4 billion on the tobacco distributor.
“Today the Supreme Court put an end to the dispute between Tedis Ukraine and the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine, which accused the company of allegedly committing anti-competitive concerted actions and imposed a fine of UAH 3.4 billion. This decision is final and not subject to appeal,” the company said in a press-release on Tuesday.
According to it, the Supreme Court overturned the decisions of the trial court and the court of appeals, made in favor of the committee.
“From the very beginning of this trial, we clearly understood that justice would be on our side and were able to prove it before the highest judicial body of the country,” the company said, quoting Director General Taras Korniyachenko as saying. According to him, the company has been working exclusively in the legal field throughout its ten-year history.
The Supreme Court said in a comment on Tuesday that it had verified the conclusions of the lower courts on the legality and validity of the impugned decision of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine, given the statutory limits of authority, but not establishing the actual circumstances of the plaintiff’s behavior. Taking into account the impossibility of bringing any person to justice on the basis of decisions of the Antimonopoly Committee in other cases (without prejudice), without mandatory proof of guilt in each individual case (in each case) and taking into account the erroneous legal qualification of actions of Tedis Ukraine LLC, the Supreme Court upheld the lawsuit,” the court said in the statement.
At the same time, the Supreme Court said that the invalidation of the decision of the Antimonopoly Committee does not deprive this body of the right to conduct a re-inspection in compliance with the requirements of current legislation.
As reported, the committee in October 2019 imposed a fine of UAH 6.5 billion for anticompetitive concerted actions on four tobacco producers and Tedis Ukraine. Philip Morris International (PMI) at the end of last year filed a lawsuit with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID, Washington, DC, the United States) on bilateral investment arbitration against Ukraine in connection with an unfair, in their opinion, fine of the committee. British American Tobacco, which lost an appeal at the end of January, also announced such plans.
Tedis Ukraine is one of the largest Ukrainian distribution companies. The company employs about 2,300 employees. The regional network consists of 32 structural divisions throughout the country. The company covers a retail network of about 45,000 retail points throughout Ukraine.
Transportation of grain by river in Ukraine in 2020 decreased by 27.3% compared to 2019, to 3.5 million tonnes, which is associated with a decrease in the harvest by 13%, to 65.4 million tonnes, a rise in the rail fleet of grain carriers and increased competition among road carriers, Andriy Muravsky, an expert in the river transportation industry, says.
In a review of the industry on Facebook, he pointed out that total shipments by river fleet last year decreased by 5.1% compared to 2019, to 11.8 million tonnes, and the decline in the transportation of grain and fertilizers was partially offset by an increase in construction cargo (more by 12.5%, to 5.8 million tonnes) and metallurgical products (more by 7%).
At the same time, fertilizers continue to enter river ports directly from Bulgaria or Georgia in the holds of river-sea class vessels, and their shipment is carried out to the berths of estuarine ports and to terminals up the Dnipro River, Muravsky said.
According to him, in 2020, competition intensified in offshore transshipment, for example, Nibulon operated the largest floating crane in Ukraine Nibulon Max for a full year. This reloader was launched in the spring of 2019 and allowed Nibulon to increase the volume of cargo transshipment by its own fleet to 4-5 million tonnes per year, the expert said. According to him, other shipping companies plan to purchase their own floating cranes to offer integrated logistics.
Muravsky also said that United Barge Company (UBC) in 2020, for the first time in Ukraine, carried out a ship-to-ship operation to reload sunflower oil from a barge to a sea tanker on the outer roadstead of Mykolaiv port, thereby reducing the freight costs of the entire vessel and was able to avoid calling to another port. Also, UBC for the first time in Ukraine fully loaded a sea tanker with oil from barges without using land terminals, the expert noted.
