Major Ukrainian business suffered losses due to the war. Therefore, it is not the right time to apply the norms of the law on oligarchs and enter them into the register, writes Yulia Akimova, Oleksandr Bilous, RBC-Ukraine.
Andriy Smirnov, Deputy Head of the Office of the President for Court Affairs, stated this.
“Today is a war. Today, even big business has lost a lot. Today, it is impossible to objectively say whether a person is an oligarch, given that these people are losing assets worth billions of dollars,” he said.
The official believes that now “making registers and running around, saying: ‘We have made a register’, is not reasonable.”
“In a country where war is raging, where people are losing factories, it is not the right time. It is difficult to give an objective assessment. It’s not worth it. We need to win the war, and then sit down and look at a specific “battle map”, he added.
Law on oligarchs
We will remind you that in 2021 Ukraine adopted a law on oligarchs (a project of President Volodymyr Zelenskyi). The law provides for restrictions on the rights of businessmen and the creation of a special register, where oligarchs will be entered. To do this, they must meet three of the four criteria:
- participation in political life,
- significant influence on mass media,
- control or possession of a monopoly,
- the presence of assets in the amount of about 2.3 billion hryvnias.
According to the final version, the definition of oligarchs is the prerogative of the NSDC, headed by Zelensky.
