The prominent founder of a popular domain name registrar and website hosting company told the Kyiv Post he is running for a seat in parliament as an independent candidate. The information technology pioneer, Oleksandr Olshanskiy, didn’t specify in which of the 225 single-mandate races he would run. Initially, he said he expected to get elected under the UDAR party ticket led by Kyiv mayor and retired boxing champion Vitaliy Klitschko, according to a Sept. 11 interview with the Kyiv Post.
Olshanskiy’s announcement comes on the heels of other
visible technology business professionals joining politics. Among them are the
former head of Microsoft Ukraine Dmytro Shymkiv, who in July became the deputy
head of President Petro Poroshenko’s administration, and Viktor Galasyuk, who
recently became an economic adviser to Radical Party leader Oleh Lyashko after
heading the Bionic Hill innovation park project.
In addition to them, the CEO and founder of Ukrainian
outsourcing software developer ELEKS, Oleksii Skrypnyk, together with
entrepreneur and co-founder of Invisible CRM Vlad Voskresenskiy, are parliamentary
candidates in Lviv mayor Andriy Sadoviy’s Samopomich party, holding the third
and 24th positions on the list, respectively. Elections are scheduled for Oct.
26 with half the 450 seats being allocated to proportional party lists, and the
other half in first-past-the-post single-mandate races.
Known for his libertarian ideas and outspoken statements
regarding politics, especially on taxation issues and the right to bear arms,
Olshanskiy expressed caution and flexibility in his plans for working as a
lawmaker.
“I’m saying things that are not peculiar to me,” Olshanskiy said.
“I’m a libertarian with a right-wing deviation, […] but the situation today is
so thin that unity may prove more valuable than radicalism.”
He continued: “Although not being perfect, the president in
my opinion has all necessary qualities to do something. And parliament now must
help him. It does not mean we don’t need to control him, but we have to give
him a chance to do something…Because the country really needs reforms.”
Reform plans
Olshanskiy acknowledged being familiar with the problems
faced by Ukraine’s tech business, but said he won’t take specific steps to help
the sector.
“I don’t believe in communism built in one particular
economic sector, and don’t believe in sector-driven economic regulation in
general. It can’t exist,” he said.
He wants to help the Ukrainian army adopt a similar
structure to that of the Swiss army and on simplifying the tax code. “I don’t
want to see the Ukrainian army similar to the Soviet Army. I’m for an army
based on contract principles, but also for mandatory short period of military
service and regular musters for all citizens,” Olshanskiy explained.
Other measures he supports are to introduce a system of
pre-draft training for the youth, as well as loosening gun control restrictions.
Taxes must go
As for economic reforms, Olshanskiy wants to “stop the war
that the government fights against business for the past 23 years.” The IT
businessman wants to start with making taxes in Ukraine more transparent by
extending the existing simplified taxation scheme, which is now available for
certain business activities.
Staying true to his repeatedly declared values, Olshanskiy
said that in the future he will also stand for abandoning the value-added tax
altogether.
“VAT is the absolute evil for any economy, as is any
implicit tax,” he added. “I think it needs to be canceled, and its propaganda
has to be criminally prosecuted.”
Another measure Olshanskiy wants to introduce is a scheme
that allows people and companies to pay their taxes directly to state-funded
organizations.
“Let’s take the army as an example. If I buy them a tank, the
army would give me a receipt for the amount I paid for it, and I would be able
to reduce my taxes by this sum. It’s not charity, I’d just directly fund the
state budget skipping the whole bureaucratic machine.”
In Olshanskiy’s opinion, this scheme can create a
competitive alternative to the government apparatus.
“Why did the Internet [in Ukraine] develop rapidly? Because
initially it wasn’t regulated by the government, and we had crazy competition,”
he said. “Recently I was asked what event was the most significant for the IT
sector in Ukraine in the last 20 years. I answered that it was the fact that in
1999 data transfer wasn’t included in the list of activities, providers of
which had to receive licenses from the government. […] Competition is our god,
we’re not given anything better.”
IT crowd in parliament
Speaking about people with tech business background
increasingly deciding to go into politics, Olshanskiy praised their appearance
on the political stage.
“These people have experience of living in a non-resource-based
economy. They are just people of another, knowledge-based economic idea,” he
said. “A person, who spent all his life in a bureaucracy-inspired environment,
has no idea how the product that they’re trying to allocate is created…
“These people [from the IT business] are self-reliant,
they’ve already done many things — and will do more. Their way of thinking is
similar to that of today’s volunteer battalions [in the war zone] — if I won’t
do it, then who will? Do you think Shymkiv dreamed of working in the president’s
administration? I assure you that a seat of the head of Microsoft Ukraine is
way more comfortable. If you don’t go to the parliament to steal money, you
have to understand that it’s hard work.”
Andrii Degeler
is the Kyiv Post’s information technology reporting fellow. Degeler has been
covering the IT business in Ukraine and internationally since 2009. His
fellowship is sponsored by AVentures
Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe. He can be reached on Twitter (@shlema) or [email protected].
