Property chief says thousands of enterprises misappropriated under Kuchma
KYIV. Some 20,000 enterprises were misappropriated in Ukraine under former President Leonid Kuchma, a newspaper quoted the head of the State Property Fund as saying in an interview published Aug. 23. Fund chief Valentyna Semeniuk told Gazeta Po-Kiyevski that the agency, which is responsible for state-owned property and its privatization, is conducting an inventory and looking into allegations of widespread misappropriations during Kuchma's decade in office.
"We have checked 65 percent (of formerly government-owned property), and the preliminary conclusion is: 20,000 businesses were stolen under Kuchma," the newspaper quoted Semeniuk as saying. She said many of the enterprises were not formally privatized, but were reorganized to place them in new hands, the paper said. She did not discuss specific enterprises or name alleged culprits.
President Viktor Yushchenko, elected in December after the Orange Revolution protests against alleged election fraud on behalf of Kuchma's chosen successor, has repeatedly criticized privatization deals carried out under his predecessor. In June, the government seized control of Ukraine's most profitable steel mill which was sold last year for $800 million to a consortium controlled by Kuchma's son-in-law Viktor Pinchuk and tycoon Rinat Akhmetov. Yushchenko called the deal theft.
Top officials have made widely varying statements about how many privatizations could face reversal. Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said the number could be in the thousands, but Yushchenko later said it was more likely to be in the dozens.
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