After just 175 days in office, Pavlo Sheremeta, the nation’s Western-educated and liberal economy minister, quit over frustration with Ukraine’s Soviet bureaucratic system.
“Yes, instead of fighting yesterday’s system, I decided to get more involved in work with the people of tomorrow – those who will create tomorrow’s system,” Sheremeta wrote on his Facebook page, implying his plans to go back to academia having once headed the Kyiv Mohyla Business School and Kyiv School of Economics.
Now, parliament’s Sep. 2 session will include his resignation as a key agenda item.
During a news briefing the same day, the 43-year-old Ph.D. student of Slovenia’s Bled School of Management, said the reason for leaving his post was an Aug. 20 Cabinet of Ministers move to appoint Valeriy Pyatnitsky, a politician who held controversial positions under Viktor Yanukovych’s disgraced presidency, as the ministry’s deputy head on European integration issues.
Meanwhile, Sheremeta had plans to appoint Yuriy Butsa, according to The Insider. “I was thinking about the resignation before. (And) yesterday the reason appeared,” Sheremeta said.
His departure came after the Cabinet, led by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, blocked two of Sheremeta’s initiatives. One was on slightly lowering some corporate taxes, the other, to establish an agency to support exporters despite the existence of state-owned Export-Import Bank reinforcing the same agenda.
The former economy minister had publicly shared his vision for applying sector-oriented economic stimulus, placing special hope with the agricultural, energy and information technology sectors. After being severely criticized by experts and economists for lacking empirically-backed substantiation, Sheremeta in an Aug. 12 interview with the Kyiv Post said that stimulating the economy should have a broader range.
Gabriela Miranda, project manager for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of rich countries, told the Kyiv Post that the institution suggested Sheremeta initiate the introduction of state guarantees for banking loans provided to agriculture businesses, but the project has not been implemented.
Forbes Ukraine yet in July reported Yatsenyuk’s poor evaluation of Sheremeta’s performance and even named Bohdan Danylyshyn, a major supporter of Yulia Tymoshenko who was the country’s pre-Yanukovych economy minister, as a major candidate.
Kostyantyn Vorushylin, who was chief financial officer at Bogdan, an automobile producer that current President Petro Poroshenko had a stake in before assuming power, was named as another candidate.
However, the seriousness of Sheremeta’s intentions is questionable, since his boss Yatsenyuk, did the same thing on July 24 and announced his resignation, but parliament didn’t accept it.
Tetyana Chornovil, the chief anti-corruption officer who became a victim of violence during the EuroMaidan Revolution, on Aug. 18 blogged she was in resigning on Ukrayinska Pravda.
“Submission of a resignation letter does not mean actual resignation yet. Sheremeta remains the minister,” said Pavlo Rozenko, member of the influential Ukraine Democratic Alliance for Reform political party in parliament and former deputy social policy minister in 2008-2010. “I will not vote for his resignation.”
Moreover, in an Aug. 21 interview with the Apostrophe, a news website, Sheremeta said he might start considering running for parliament expected to take place later this year. “But this is not my priority,” he added.
Oleksandr Paskhaver, Kyiv-based economic analyst who criticized Sheremeta for taking a sector-oriented approach in helping the economy out of the current crisis, thinks being a public official is too difficult for a former academician who has to deal with a huge bureaucratic apparatus.
“Sheremeta was a very special candidate from the very beginning. He’s an academic and never has been a bureaucrat,” Paskhaver said in a phone interview. Meanwhile, the prominent sociologist Iryna Bekeshkina saw a good sign in Sheremeta’s readiness to quit since the public views politicians as those who would never agree to losing power.
A devoted reader of The Economist and Wall Street Journal on his iPad, Sheremeta came to office on Feb. 27 in the wake of the EuroMaidan Revolution appointments, succeeding Ihor Prasolov, the former chief executive officer of billionaire’s Rinat Akhmetov System Capital Management.
Kyiv Post staff writer Iana Koretska can be reached at [email protected].
