Ukrainian businessman, the owner of the DCH Group, Oleksandr Yaroslavsky is ready to invest $100 million in construction of a new Donetsk airport.
“I have been thinking for a long time and have decided to give $100 million and build a new airport in Donetsk. Considering that I understand this, our company has experience in both construction and operation, I am ready to build the new airport on the site of the completely destroyed old one,” he said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine on Tuesday in Mariupol on the sidelines of the First Investment Forum.
Yaroslavsky said that the airport will become a symbol of the return of peaceful life.
The businessman said that the implementation of this project will be possible after the completion of the process of reintegration of the occupied territories of Donbas into Ukraine.
DCH Group, a Ukrainian industrial and financial group of Oleksandr Yaroslavsky, is ready to invest in the reconstruction of Dnipro International Airport.
According to the press service of Dnipropetrovsk Regional State Administration, the project for the reconstruction of the airport was discussed by head of the regional administration Oleksandr Bondarenko and President of DCH Group Oleksandr Yaroslavsky during a meeting in Dnipro.
“A modern international airport is one of the main priorities of Dnipropetrovsk Regional State Administration. The reconstruction of the airport, which has long been morally and physically outdated, will give an impetus to the development of the entire region. These are new opportunities for business, medicine, tourism and the region’s economy as a whole,” Bondarenko said.
According to Yaroslavsky, DCH Group is ready to invest in Dnipro airport under public-private partnership.
He noted that the company already has experience in implementing a similar project in Kharkiv. There, the construction of the runway cost $200 million, the terminal some $107 million.
According to the president of the group, thanks to optimization and modern technologies, in Dnipro such work will be at least $100 million cheaper.
“I’ve repeatedly confirmed that I am ready to use our experience in the construction and development of Kharkiv International Airport in favor of the Dnipro community, the surrounding regions, the whole Ukraine. As soon as full funding for the construction of a runway is actually allocated and fixed in the 2020 national budget, DCH as a private investor will be able to begin work on the construction of the airport complex,” Yaroslavsky said.
The Cabinet of Ministers sets a goal of raising $50 billion of investment for GDP growth of 40% in five years in the government program, Ukrainian Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk has said.
“We confirm that over the next five years (and we consider this situation realistic and aiming high with this ambition) we will come to a situation when our economy will grow by 40%. To do this, we need to attract somewhere $50 billion of investment,” he said at a press briefing in Kyiv on Monday, talking about the government’s program.
As reported, the State Statistics Service in 2018 substantially revised foreign direct investment (FDI) indicators in Ukraine in the form of equity capital: if at December 31, 2017 they amounted to $39.14 billion, then at January 1, 2018 – $31.59 billion. According to the statistics, FDI growth for the first half of 2019 amounted to $0.84 billion, compared with $0.69 billion in 2018 and $0.38 billion in 2017, while before that, three years FDI were reduced – totally by $22.47 billion.
In addition, according to Honcharuk, the government sets itself the task of creating 1 million jobs.
“We must create such conditions so that it would be comfortable for people to start a business, their own business, so that foreign companies would be interested in entering the country,” the prime minister said.
The government said in the program, posted on the website of the Verkhovna Rada on Monday, that the government intends to distribute new budget revenues according to the 70/30 principle, “where 70% will be invested in economic development, 30% will be spent on social security.”
“To simplify the calculations, we proceed from the fact that 1% of inclusive economic growth gives us about UAH 15 billion of revenue to the national budget,” the government said in the document.
In the opening statement of the program, bringing of all the main roads into good condition (24,000 km), the active development of the railway and the construction of five deep-sea ports and 15 airports are listed among the main plans.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk at a meeting with President of Finland Sauli Väinämö Niinistö has invited business of Finland to invest in Ukrainian projects. The press service of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine reported that the talk was focused on the discussion of investment climate in Ukraine and the exchange of experience between Ukraine and Finland in conducting reforms, in particular in education. “Ukraine has many difficult tasks at the same time, in particular, improving the investment climate. We have updated public private partnership tools, as we are interested in attracting investments in large infrastructure projects. We invite Finnish business to participate,” Honcharuk’s press service quotes. The participants in the meeting also discussed the importance of developing international transport routes, including river and port logistics and infrastructure.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has called on international business to invest in Ukraine and presented a number of promising projects.
“We have a number of projects to which I, under my personal guarantees, the guarantees of protection, invite foreign businesses. These are energy, infrastructure, transparent land circulation,” he said at the 16th Annual Meeting of the Yalta European Strategy (YES) in Kyiv.
In particular, Zelensky presented a project on land irrigation in the southern regions of the country, an inter-university IT cluster in Kharkiv, a film production center in Kyiv, a new resort on the Black Sea coast in a completely new city, ski resorts in Slavske and Borzhava, the development of Khortytsia island, a large-scale entertainment park for guests from Eastern and Central Europe.
“This is not a complete list of reasons why we invite you to invest in Ukraine,” the president added.
ENERGY, INFRASTRUCTURE, INVEST, PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE, TOURISM
A Dubai-originated fund is studying investing over $1 bln to Ukraine through the end of 2020, Amer Kharb, the fund’s Ukraine country representative, tells UBN.
Kharb, who plans to open an office in Kyiv this fall, targets investments in infrastructure, construction, logistics, agriculture, defense and energy.
“We consider this first $1 billion seed capital in anticipation of much more investment in the future,” he said Monday in Kyiv.
“A well-governed Ukraine presents Europe’s best opportunities for growth and development”, he added.
