Odesa governor and former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili took aim at an official blamed for defending billionaire Igor Kolomoisky's near monopolistic grip on air travel through Ukraine International Airlines.
President Petro Poroshenko backed him up, announcing the suspension of Denys
Antonyuk, head of
the State Aviation Service. Antonyuk is the former director of network development and alliances for Ukraine International Airlines, which has a near monopoly over air travel in Ukraine.
Poroshenko announced
about the suspension after a meeting with Saakashvili and Infrastructure Minister Andriy Pyvovarsky, who oversees the State Aviation Service, on June 27.
“An investigation will be conducted into operation of the State Aviation Service, and during this period Antonyuk will be suspended from the post,” Poroshenko said.
Saakashvili called the step a welcome development in Poroshenko’s “de-oligarchization program” and thanked Pyvovarsky for his support in assigning commercial flights on a more competitive basis.
SAS is designated to allocate permits for the flight
routes within domestic and international airlines. In April, Atlasjet Ukraine
submitted necessary documents to obtain permits for domestic
and international flights from Lviv, Kyiv, and Odesa.
At a June 26 meeting of the commission, created
by the Infrastructure Ministry to monitor the assignments of flights, Antonyuk
approved the decision of SAS to refuse Turkish low-cost airlines Atlasjet in placing its flight route to Istanbul through
Odesa and allocated the route to UIA.
Present at the meeting, Saakashvili accused Antonyuk
of serving the interests of oligarchy, specifically Ukraine International Airlines, owned by Kolomoisky.
“By this decision you
decreased the number of tourists that will fly to Odesa by 2-3 times,”
Saakashvili said. “People cannot fly cheaper where only one
company gets all the routes. You have just sold out the country’s interest in
return for the oligarchic designations.”
Antonyuk took over SAS in March 2014, with his performance prompting many complaints.
In March of this year, the Cabinet of Ministers created a commission to oversee the operations of
SAS after airlines accused Antonyuk was lobbying Ukraine International Airline’s interests.
Hungary’s low-cost WizzAir has cut
10 Ukrianian routes and stopped operations at its local subsidiary in April,
also claiming opaque regulation of air transportation, amid the economic
crisis and the war on the east, to be the reason why it fled Ukraine.
Kyiv
Post staff writer BozhenaSheremeta can be reached at [email protected].
