Political Cash Coming Out

UKRAINE - In Brief 30 Oct 2016 by Dmytro Boyarchuk

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Over the last week Ukrainians enjoy a real time show about top politicians and civil servants reporting in e-declarations their assets, incomes and piles of cash. Recall there was a huge fight to introduce e-declarations mechanisms. It was for many times attacked by local establishment and only thanks to incredible pressure from the West it was finally launched this fall. Now all officials have to comply with the new rule and have to strip their wealth under threat of criminal prosecution. As a result, in media and social nets there was nothing more important to discuss recently except for e-declarations of the members of the Cabinet, MPs, Head of the Central bank, and top politicians. Though Ukrainians in general knew that local elites are rich people, still it was a surprise to discover many details. For instance, absolute majority of top faces do not trust to the banking system and keep their money in cash. Also it was a big fun to learn that top management of the Central bank does not believe in national currency and keeps their savings in US dollars and in cash. Tough luck for civil servants who never had official businesses but declared millions of US dollars of savings amid negligible official salaries. We are witnessing a parade of inconsistencies in this mass wealth striptease. It’s difficult to predict how exactly e-declarations will affect political life but they have already made a new push for the society. From reaction of observers we can report that Ukrainians are pretty much shocked to see all that reports especially about politicians which used to be “defenders of poor”. Theoretically after such ‘coming out’ there should be a lot of questions to many p...