Reformer of the week: Ivan Miklos
Ivan Miklos, an adviser to Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, on Oct. 12 criticized the Ukrainian parliament’s decision to extend the moratorium on the sale of agricultural land until Jan. 1, 2018.
“Extending the moratorium on land sales will have a very negative impact on regions and cities, because a land market could become one of the biggest incentives for development and investment,” he said.
Groysman, on the contrary, has supported the moratorium.
All of the factions of the Verkhovna Rada backed the ban on land sales on Oct. 6, preventing the emergence of a competitive land market and blocking investments in land.
Miklos also said Ukrainian authorities lacked political will for deep, fundamental reforms. The Verkhovna Rada supported only 37 percent of the cabinet’s reformist initiatives in 2015, compared to 99 percent in Slovakia in 2003, he said.
Miklos, a former Slovak finance minister and deputy prime minister, oversaw free-market reforms in his native country in the 1990s and 2000s.
Anti-reformer of the week: Volodymyr Hutsulyak
Supreme Court Chief Justice Yaroslav Romaniuk. (Ratynskyi Viacheslav)
Yaroslav Romanyuk, the head of the Supreme Court, has been resisting judicial reform.
The Supreme Court on Oct. 3 asked the Constitutional Court, whose judges are being investigated on suspicion of being bribed by ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and helping him usurp power, to cancel the current judicial reforms.
The reforms envisage abolishing the current Supreme Court and holding a competition for new Supreme Court judges.
Under Yanukovych, the Supreme Court and other top courts were effectively subjugated to the executive branch.
Odesa Oblast Governor Mikheil Saakashvili wrote in his recent book, “The Awakening of a Force,” that Yanukovych had told him during a visit to the United Nations headquarters in New York that he had paid a $20 million bribe to the head of the Supreme Court, without naming him. The Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment.
Yanukovych and Saakashvili last visited the United Nations headquarters in September 2013. Romanyuk became head of the Supreme Court in May 2013.
